TL;DRon Counter-Strike
~5 min read
Chop stopped the chop
Farewell to one of the games most mediocre IGLs
Well thank f-ck for that - chopper has retired. MOUZ have also won their first IEM trophy, so they’ve got something to celebrate, too.
Outside of that, we’re taking a look at why 9z are just rubbish now, and how FURIA’s IEM career came to a disappointing end.
- After all that, it’s a bit of a shame that The MongolZ just rolled over and got battered by MOUZ. That final was brutal viewing.
- It isn’t a shame that PARIVISION lost, though. F-ck PARIVISION.
A flop for FURIA in FalleN’s last IEM
We f-cking knew it.
We knew that when FURIA won the Thunderpick World Championships and PGL Masters Bucharest in rather unconvincing fashions, that they weren’t the team that took late-2025 by storm.
And what do you know? We were right.
Sure, they’ve been better recently, but losing to BETBOOM in a quarter-final? zorte making molodoy look like SIXER? yuurih back to being hopeless? This still isn’t a team you can get your hopes up for in Singapore.
It’s also just quite sad to see FalleN’s final IEM end in such a lacklustre way, especially given their recent trophy wins and the fact he finished second in the two biggest IEMs of the year.
No disrespect to BETBOOM btw, they’re genuinely quite good. But FURIA should beat them everytime. Easily.
Speaking of games that should’ve been easy wins - what happened to NAVI against The MongolZ?
NAVI’s recent revivial has been pretty exciting to see, especially given that a large part of it has come from w0nderful and b1t playing out of their minds. So how did The MongolZ - with 910 sh-tting the bed, cobrazera as the most lacklustre star in tier one, and an AWP IGL who is doing neither of those jobs - take them down 2-0?
Credit where credit’s due to the Mongolians, and especially bLitz who had a stellar series, but NAVI… you can’t be doing this if you want us to believe you actually have an ounce of consistency.
At least they bounced back in the third-place game - they took down BETBOOM after two more stellar showings from b1t and w0nderful - but that was still overshadowed by iM getting ratioed by the Rainbow 6 Twitter account and made to look worse than when he takes a 50/50 duel as a result.
iM, mate, we think it might be time to pack it in after that one.
9zzzzzzzzz
Even though they went 3-0 to make the playoffs at PGL Astana, everyone was still caught off-guard by 9z's IEM Cologne Major run.
They cleared Stage 2 with a 3-1 record, then proceeded to beat Parivision and Vitality in Stage 3, making the Major playoffs for the first time in their history with a 3-2 record - only to be eliminated by fellow South American team FURIA in the quarterfinals.
It's all been downhill from there.
Sure, they won their first (just about) tier one trophy right after the Major, but the strongest team they beat to win XSE Pro League was PARIVISION, and that says everything we need to know about that tournament.
In the last three months, 9z have won just eight maps in thirty, and only two BO3s across seven tournaments. Yeah, you've read that right. Is this just their normal form, and what we saw in Cologne and China was just an overperformance?
Probably - although we won’t say it wasn’t predictable.
It’s really coming down to the players going to sh-t, too. luchov, the star of their run in Cologne, now struggles to get positive ratings, while meyern fought so hard with r1nkle for the title of worst AWPer in tier one that he finally got benched. When are G2 going to do the same?
This is without mentioning the fact that max is a rather average IGL, or that dgt is pretty much invisible. Poor HUASOPEEK is still putting in some good performances, but he’s always going to be a baller with a name like that.
BIT, their coach, said that they're lucky to be in the Major and that they don't deserve to be there. Well, we can agree on that. Bringing in an inexperienced Brazilian AWPer like history will do little to improve their situation, but from what BIT said on his X account, there were not a lot of players willing to board the a sinking ship.
We wish 9z the best of luck, because they f-cking need it. Luck, prayers, herbal baths, and a few better pieces to prove they deserve not just to be in the Major, but in tier one CS.
How to become the GOAT
You know what pro players do? Play a lot of CS. You know where they do it? Community servers.
At least we think they do. They don’t really talk to us.
Either way, we play on them a lot over at Wideswing, and we’re all A) cracked at the game and B) so incredibly knowledgeable at the game that you spend your time reading our opinions on it. So, if you’d like to at least be like us, get on Wideswing for Deathmatch, Retakes, 1v1s, and stop playing on whatever sh-t you currently use.
You trust us for everything else, so trust us with this, too.
The promised one
623 days.
The last time MOUZ lifted a big trophy, GTA VI was “coming fall 2025”, s1mple was a FaZe stand-in, and 67 still just meant sixty-seven.
That’s how long all twelve MOUZ fans waited since the PGL Cluj-Napoca title in February 2025. Ask them and they’ll say it was worth it. Ask anyone else who sacrificed a Sunday morning’s sleep to watch the boring-ass IEM Beijing 2026 final, and you’ll get a very different answer.
Normally, we’d walk you through each map and pick out the best bits, but there’s just one small problem: nothing happened. MOUZ turned into pre-sex Vitality and turbostomped The MongolZ so hard we actually started feeling bad for them.
About the only moment worth highlighting on the Mongolian side was this re-enactment of fnatic’s 4 AWP peek. You know it’s bad when you only manage 15 rounds across three maps.
Don’t get us wrong, nobody expected The MongolZ to win it, but after the run they’d been on, we at least expected a fight.
Instead, xertioN’s boys went the entire tournament without dropping a single map. And it was the captain leading by example, topping the final’s scoreboard with a 1.44 rating to seal the MVP. That makes him the first IGL to take home an MVP award in four years, since Jame at the IEM Rio Major.
MOUZ couldn’t have picked a better time to lock in. This is the confidence boost they needed to break the shackles and head into the Major as a genuine contender, one that (hopefully) doesn’t melt at the first hint of pressure. A deep field always makes for an entertaining Major, and MOUZ have just planted themselves firmly in the Big 3 and among the favourites heading to Singapore.
Alright, that’s enough MOUZ glazing. Counter-Strike died today.
The most overrated IGL to ever do it
Now that chopper has retired, do you know what we’re not doing? We’re not doing some revisionism to claim he was ever a great IGL.
“B-but he made Major playoffs with Spirit before he had donk!” - yeah, we don’t give a f-ck. It wasn’t like he had a terrible team, either. Virtually all of them were very highly rated youngsters and have mostly been tier one mainstays since - two of them have even won Majors in the years since.
Besides, we also really don’t care what an IGL can do at one off tournaments. What did chopper do for the rest of those years? Where were his teams then? And don’t cry “partner system”, because Snappi and Jame both went and had success at ESL Challenger events so they could be in tier one consistently.
Even when chopper had donk he wasn’t impressive. They wouldn’t have benched him if he was. No, instead it was the same egregiously stale stratbook - most likely created by hally because chopper didn’t actually have the juice to make his own - and the same disappointing tournament results ill-befitting of the star at his disposal.
It’s why we’ve never really cared that Spirit won the Major, Cologne, and Katowice. Because during that time, they never actually had anything close to an era. They never defined sh-t.
Spirit under chopper were a team with a top three AWPer and also the most individually skilled player to ever touch CS, and the odds of them winning consecutive trophies were about as high as anyone reading or writing this newsletter having sex.
Meaning that it probably did happen once or twice, but it’s still bloody rare.
Your opinions on chopper should be formed purely from this zont1x interview. chopper didn’t have it in him to become a great IGL, and if it wasn’t for donk, his retirement wouldn’t be more than a half-arsed mention in the “Everything Else” section.
An incredibly poor leader, with an entirely overrated end to his career. Good riddance, we say.
And while we’re at it, how about we also say “let’s get donk a real, experienced IGL”? Because it’s either that or saying “Congratulations to Vitality for winning Team of the Year” for years to come.
📜 A final filled with the divine
- The ticker operator took a pretty big risk putting that on screen for MOUZ’ win. He could have only gotten that idea from Benjamin- actually, nevermind.
- Although The MongolZ also pulled out the ancient texts to find a Dust II strat. He could have only gotten that idea from Robin Rönnquist.
🥸 Obscure roster moves
- We’ll be honest, we’ve never really heard of Anlelele before but at this point anything beats cmtry.
- We have heard of NBK however, and he has decided to become head coach for Phantom! (Yeah, again, we have no idea who they are.)
🎭 The mask is off
- If I had a nickel for every time a former Dutch pro went off the deep end after his career and used questionable language on Twitter, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird it happened twice.
- Seems like one of Jimpphat’s exes still has a bone to pick with him.
