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GUIDES
Simple Radar
© 2026 TLDR Media, All Rights Reserved.
Sorry, s1mple, you’ve lost your crown
Our New Year’s resolution is to stop using overused jokes. Just kidding - it’s 1920x1080.
Now free from the shackles of chopper’s IGLing and hally’s “I’ll remember you exist after donk doesn’t kill three gameplans”, zweih can go and find himself a team where he can be a star again.
That team – according to the latest rumours – will be PARIVISION, where the youngster looks set to replace AW, the least impressive piece of a team that went on a pretty impressive run during the Budapest Major.
There is, of course, just one issue with that: Jame.
This isn’t a Jame-slander piece btw, we bloody love the bloke, but we do have some concerns about what this move might do because we’ve been here before.
Cast yourself back to 2023. Jame’s VP are the reigning Major champions, but they fail to kick on from their success. Why? Because in the quest for more gold, the team forgot what makes them tick: soldiers.
Jame’s system needs soldiers in order to function. AW is one of Jame’s most loyal, he throws an absurd amount of PARIVISION’s utility and does whatever his leader asks of him, whenever he asks for it.
zweih just shouldn’t be that guy. That’s the same type of bullsh-t that saw him fail in Spirit. So if he’s put into the same position on another roster, is the same thing not just going to happen again?
Even if he’s put into a better position, who will take over AW’s duties? Someone has to, and it sure as sh-t won’t be Jame.
It’s not that we don’t like this move, it’s exactly the level of team zweih should be playing for at this point in his career, we just hope that Jame has learned his lesson from the past.
Over the course of 2025, Aurora went from one of our favourite teams to one of our least favourites.
We still like watching them play — who doesn’t like watching XANTARES? — but ultimately they’re chokers, and the b-tching and moaning and excuses that come after that are a little more than we can handle.
Fortunately, they’re trying to address their issues, bringing in soulfly in place of jottAAA to try and add some more consistency.
Now, this could all go t-ts up when MAJ3R gets a hold of him (and it wouldn’t surprise us if it did) but at a first glance we like this move. soulfly is very comfortable in aggressive roles and very good at them, too. He’s the type of player who could be a long-term successor to XANTARES, should the 3-year-old see a downturn in form in 2026.
He’s also just — albeit at a lower level of competition — had a much better year than jottAAA, and a year of being pretty crap is when things like confidence start to come into effect. Aurora sunk towards the tail-end of 2025 and jottAAA was the first to go down, how deep would you have to reach in order to pull him back up?
Sometimes a change is what’s needed to get back on track, and this is a change that won’t hurt anybody. Aurora get to stay Turkish, soulfly gets his deserved step up, and jottAAA gets to go have another crack at being a decent player elsewhere.
We like it. We just still won’t get our hopes up. You’ve burned us one too many times, lads.
There aren’t too many rumours regarding transfers at the moment, so we ask you this:
So we’re all agreed it’s donk, right?
You can make an argument for ZywOo, just like you can make an argument for device being the best CS:GO player ever, or Ronaldo being the best footballer ever, or Counter-Strike 2 being better than CS:GO.
The rest of us have eyes, though, and won’t be fooled by your tricks.
ZywOo has the accolades, the MVPs and the pictures of him winning trophies. That’s invaluable, and we’re not going to sit here and pretend that winning things isn’t important. It is - that’s the ultimate goal of competition, and we’re not going to say it’s irrelevant.
It might even be enough to give ZywOo the #1 player of 2025 on HLTV, but it doesn’t make him the best player. We know that sounds contradictory, but… we’re also pretty sure you’re intelligent enough to understand what we mean.
donk is a better player. He’s more impactful on a worse team, he dominates on pretty much any metric that’s worth considering, and the few times Spirit haven’t been playing Bazball (for non-English readers, that means suicidal style to the point of losing) have been because donk has won on his own.
He doesn’t need the AWP, and opens rounds up in ways pretty much nobody ever has. NiKo was never this good. olofmeister wasn’t this aggressive. coldzera relied on everyone else. s1mple could do it, but with the AWP it was hard for him to multifrag like donk does.
donk took #1 last year and he’s gotten better. **You can argue ZywOo has, but his team levelled up. The second Major came from ridiculous showings from mezii and ropz in the final, with ZywOo being gifted an MVP for smacking The MongolZ in the quarter-final.
That’s only slightly hyperbolic.
If ZywOo doesn’t show up, Vitality win a Major. If donk doesn’t show up, Spirit go out in the group stages.
And Spirit still managed to win IEM Cologne.
donk is the best player in the world. He’s also the best player of all time, but that’s for another newsletter. ZywOo is great, one of the best ever.
But he isn’t donk. Nobody is.
It’s been a while since we’ve tested your knowledge, so which legend and former Major winner’s career is this?
Scroll down to find the answer!
Trivia answer: flusha
