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GUIDES
Simple Radar
© 2026 TLDR Media, All Rights Reserved.
And Heroic’s deal with the devil continues to plague them.
It’s the final edition of the year - but we bring Christmas gifts of betrayal, domination, greed and gluttony. Enjoy!
It’s been a wonderful year of Counter-Strike.
From the freezing cold corners of Katowice to the cosmopolitan streets of Paris to the Cologne glistening Cologne cathedral in the midsummer sun, TLDR has been around the world watching the best game of all time.
We’ve seen the birth of a new version of Counter-Strike and all the unique joys and frustrations that that has brought.
We’ve also seen s1mple the GOAT take a break, G2 beguile and bewilder in equal fashion, NAVI and Liquid go international, Heroic rise and fall apart, Astralis do everything they could to get back to the top level - and that is merely a fraction of it all.
Thank you for joining us this year. Truly.
We loved curating the news to you this year, reading your replies and discussing to no end in our Discord.
This will be the last edition of TLDR in 2023, and we can’t wait to see you back here in your inbox in 2024 for another year of crazy news, dazzling sunshine and more m0NESY clips (read on).
Much love,
Your TLDR team
aizyesque, ANDY, AREDONE, beefkeeper, benji, Crash_, dickle, Fuffy, Horizzon, Incipiens, M3CHATR0NIC, napz, NER0, novah, PHedemark, Roma Bib, simba, Welshy
PS. If you, or one of your friends, have a product or a service that you’d like to advertise please reach out to us at [email protected] and we’ll share a media deck.
We are volunteer based, but plan to make 2024 the year we level up and change that – become a part of that journey!
The CIS scene might’ve found their new kings.
Team Spirit just signed sh1ro from C9, adding a star to go along with their re-donk-ulous talent.
This team looks like it has no weaknesses. zont1x and magixx have both proven to be talents and are incredibly adept at their roles. Chopper is the only mechanically iffy player, and he’s one of - if not the best - IGL in the CIS region.
Is it a little crazy to change a roster right after winning your first top event? Sure. But can you blame them?
sh1ro is an incredible AWPer, and he’s proved as much on Gambit and Cloud9. The 22-year-old has four HLTV MVPs, was previously the 4th and 3rd best player in the world, and was waisting away on the bench. For Spirit, this was a no brainer.
Although there’s one big loser in this deal.
You can’t deny it’s a little harsh to give ArtFr0st the boot since he hasn’t exactly underperformed. He’s been a hard-hitting AWPing machine even as recently as last week's BetBoom Dacha final. But his downfall is his stat drop-off when playing against the better teams, and for a team trying to contend, that won’t cut it.
sh1ro is a nearly perfect AWPer, which is exactly what Spirit needs to be tipped over the edge.
Team Spirit will start 2024 with:
🇷🇺 sh1ro
🇺🇦 zont1x
🇷🇺 donk
🇷🇺 magixx
🇷🇺 chopper
When Heroic re-signed HUNDEN, they signed a Faustian bargain in blood. Okay, a bit dramatic. But if the glove fits…
Their bad luck has been well-documented, and the newest saga is another crazy addition.
Reports came out last week that Heroic were trying to sign SunPayus, maden and NertZ, and that the move would be imminent. Almost simultaneously, news spread on x.com that kyxsan would replace TeSeS to make their new augmented ENCE version.
And then… they couldn’t find the money, apparently.
SunPayus can’t be cheap, after all.
Lo and behold, not two days later, Falcons announced the ‘final pieces of the puzzle’, which included both maden and SunPayus. Adding to Magisk, Snappi and BOROS, the pair finish what looks like a very scary team.
That does leave NertZ, who couldn’t find a spot on Falcons (you can probably use your imagination to figure out why he was the one left out…). If Heroic could grab NertZ, they’d at least have a genuine star to build around. sjuush, TeSeS, NertZ plus two others could still be a good team.
But knowing Heroic’s luck…
All we’re saying is, we wouldn’t be too surprised if MOUZ are sniffing around NertZ should things fall apart - and that really would be the final kick to the gut of Heroic.
For Falcons, they’ve just bought 3/5 of the ENCE line-up, traded wildcard for wildcard with Dycha to BOROS, and swapped Magisk for NertZ.
Keep it under your hat, but they might be one of the best teams in the world.
Finally, Falcons are:
🇯🇴 BOROS
🇩🇰 Snappi (IGL)
🇪🇸 SunPayus
🇲🇪 Maden
🇩🇰 Magisk
🇩🇰 zonic (coach)
If you’re somewhere in the Americas part of the world, you’ve had the good fortune of waking up to excellent games from BLAST and wind down with some so-so CS from ESL Challenger Atlanta.
We honestly, didn’t follow it closely but we know how to do a quick TLDR after all:
Virtus.Pro bested Apeks 2-0 to claim the trophy. The Russian side didn’t drop a map all tournament and conceded just 9 rounds in the final - Virtus.Plow, anyone?
fame shined throughout the event, posting a 1.44 rating and earning the MVP award. The rest of the team were no slouches, though. The Russians were a combined +49 in the final, with no individual players in the red.
With the win, VP have earned some cool cash and a ticket to ESL Pro League Season 19.
Apeks finished a strong event with a dud in the final. sense registered 8 kills in two maps, and found only a single frag on Inferno. Ouch.
Complexity will be left red-faced after bombing out in the group stage. The Americans entered Atlanta as favourites to win the tournament, but fell to TheMongolz twice and thus made an exit just before playoffs.
They weren’t the worst NA team though: M80 and Gamerlegion bombed out in last.
Final standings:
1st 🇷🇺 Virtus.pro - $50.000 + EPL 19 qualification
2nd 🇪🇺 Apeks - $20.000
3-4th 🇺🇦 Monte - $10.000
3-4th 🇲🇳 TheMongolz - $10.000
5-6th 🇦🇷 BESTIA - $3.000
5-6th 🇺🇸 Complexity - $3.000
It’s one week to Christmas, and yet here in Abu Dhabi you wouldn’t think so, were it not for the Christmas trees and songs that have, bizarrely, permeated the zeitgeist in this strange place.
The sun is blaring; albeit, that’s coming from a man so white (aizyesque) that hummus was considered an exotic experiment for the first day he arrived here. It’s ‘only’ a cool 27 degrees celsius, after all.
The crowd is lively, but small, and the streets are stunning, but empty. There are a lot of things about this place that don’t make a lot of sense, but there’s one thing that makes total sense.
Vitality are the best team in the world.
It’s a sentence we’ve said quite a lot this year, and it’s one you’ll probably have to get used to hearing.
They toppled FaZe in Copenhagen for Fall Finals, and tonked them in Abu Dhabi to cement their place at the top of the charts to end the year. It might not surprise you to learn, also, that ZywOo was the MVP.
Again.
He was chased closely to it by mezii, who has levelled up from Fall Finals to become a key part of everything Vitality do. But ZywOo dropped a masterclass on Nuke to seal his MVP status, encapsulated by one round where he shimmied around the double doors before no-scoping a player through them.
This was one round after he had already no-scoped a player through that door, by the way.
apEX, simultaneously, has morphed over 2023 from the butt of the joke to the top of the class. He called a stunning tournament, and that they so confidently dealt with all of karrigan’s tricks is testament to how good they are.
Vitality are not just world champions, they are the best in the world without a question, and it’s hard to imagine anyone beating them at this moment in time.
Final standings:
1st 🇪🇺 Vitality - $500.000
2nd 🇪🇺 FaZe - $250.000
3-4th 🇪🇺 NAVI - $85.000
3-4th 🇪🇺 MOUZ - $85.000
5-6th 🇪🇺 G2 Esports - $25.000
5-6th 🇷🇺 Cloud9 - $25.000
