The greatest combination of honors that a player can walk away from a tournament with would be simultaneously lifting the trophy while donning the individual HLTV MVP medal. In the professional Counter-Strike space, there has only been one regular body which has bestowed MVP medals which the community has taken note of, HLTV dot org. Even though they have handed these medals out since 2012, their criteria and consistency has been under more scrutiny as of late due to a question regarding their uniformity. The actual truth is, they’ve never been consistent.
So what? A website can mess around and hand out MVP medals to players that are oftentimes no weaker than the 2nd or 3rd best in a tournament. This does not really matter in the grand scheme surely? A random fan came into my Twitch stream saying that the players don’t care either. That’s where any casual fan of CS esports would be incorrect. Striker was recently quoted at the 2025 HLTV Awards saying that “it wasn’t even close” between donk and ZywOo despite donk having blown ZywOo’s individual stats out of the water due to the sheer fact that ZywOo had more MVP medals. If you don’t think that donk cares about being #1 in the world you haven’t been paying attention. Of course he cares about winning MVPs when they’re the most important criterion factored in to your Top 20 placement. I’ve even seen professional players check HLTV stats between maps in the middle of a Bo3 before.
You should be able to see how problematic it is when MVPs are not uniformly distributed. HLTV Top 20 lists go down in history and are referred to when recalling who was the top dog of the year and who was a bum (not making the list). History is written with every successive MVP handed out.
Let’s go back to the very first HLTV MVP handed out in September of 2012 to f0rest at DreamHack Valencia. This was 70% decided by fans and 30% decided by a panel of experts. Yep, you read that correctly. The very first HLTV MVP was decided by a fan vote. Not with statistics, not passed on via the judgment of a select council of HLTV staff members but a fan vote.
An important note before diving into a list of questionable MVPs in HLTV’s history is Tgwri1s’ reddit post from December 2018 in which he explains much of his philosophy behind giving MVPs which is the blueprint of their award today.
This is worth bringing up because the common retort to many statistical output-driven MVPs would be the IGL being the most impactful to a team’s success. Tgwri1s states that he would “prefer to focus on what is knowable and measurable” in his response and states “everything outside of that are intangibles to me, and i have to accept I can’t know how much value they add or detract.” I find this entirely fair because most intangibles are snippets gathered from broadcasts in the form of interviews, listen-in moments of teams’ communications, and builds on pundit-built narratives.
I’ll be focusing on several cases of questionable MVP medals which are in reverse chronological order:
The most recent is donk’s MVP medal over sh1ro at the September 2026 BLAST Open Porto. In the playoffs, sh1ro had the better overall Rating of a 1.31 to donk’s 1.21. This is already a huge gap which would usually qualify sh1ro for the MVP over donk. On top of that, sh1ro had the higher rated match vs Furia which was the final game of the group stage with a 1.33 over donk’s 1.31.
In HLTV’s article to defend this, the first cited number is donk’s “superlative 1.61-rated group stage performance” which is suddenly something I guess we should deeply care about even though great group stage performances have rarely merited inclusion to EVP lists with extremely rare exceptions (eg. kyousuke IEM Cologne 2025). Also, Kills Per Round Win (KPRW) was cited as well where donk fairly cleared sh1ro when filtering for Top 5 opponents (donk’s 1.24 vs sh1ro’s 1.02). My defense for sh1ro is simple, vs Top 5 opponents he had higher Rating and Round Swing.
Another recent case of MVP robbery is Spinx over torzsi in the BLAST Bounty Season 2 of 2026. Spinx was not even in remote contention for this award prior to the Grand Final. This is where HLTV directly contradicts itself in multiple ways. The overall KPRW leader between Spinx and torzsi is torzsi (1.02 for torzsi vs 0.91 for Spinx). Additionally, torzsi’s overall event stats are better, vastly so if one decides to include the online group stage. The one match that Spinx had a higher Rating than torzsi was the final vs Spirit (1.54 vs 1.05).
For the last 7 or so years when looking at HLTV MVPs, it’s been an award for the tournament not for the Grand Final. Spinx would not have been in that grand final if torzsi did not win essential clutches throughout the tournament in matches that Mouz barely survived. Apparently though, “the medal had to go towards the player who contributed more deeper into the tournament.”
This brings us to what is arguably the most contentious MVP in recent Major history, Starladder Budapest. ropz lost out to ZywOo despite the fact that both players were nearly inseparable, until the grand final. Ropz posted a massive 1.39 over ZywOo’s 1.23 in the grand final and both players had the exact same rating for the rest of the playoffs. ZywOo’s tournament Rating edged out ropz’s by 0.01 when factoring in the group stage. This is after ropz posted his highest-ever Rating on a map on the 4th and final map of the Major with a whopping 2.89.
If you go back to the graphic that shows everyone Rating in bar chart on HLTV’s page of this map, ropz’s number literally goes outside of the graphic because he’s so far ahead of everyone else. HLTV goes back to cite “the tiebreaker…was kills per round win” where ZywOo had 1.17 KRPW whereas ropz has 1.02. The same metric that torzsi beat Spinx on, but Spinx apparently overcame with a great Grand Finals is now the metric being used against ropz so he lost out to ZywOo.
The craziest MVP of CS2 has to be the very first MVP handed out by HLTV in CS2. At IEM Sydney 2023, rain took the MVP from a ropz with higher overall Rating, higher playoff Rating, higher grand final Rating, and higher KPRW. The stat that somehow won rain the MVP? “stats in map 3 deciders.” I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. FaZe played 1 map 3 throughout 7 maps in the playoffs and they played 3 3-map series in the group stage. So HLTV handed rain an MVP because he was highly Rated in 1 playoff map and 3 group stage maps. Total bollocks.
There are numerous egregious cases of MVP’s being handed out to the wrong person in history: iM at IEM Rio 2024 and MSL at DreamHack Stockholm 2018 jump off the page. Go back and look and they’re indefensible if you use any of the criteria HLTV has mentioned prior and since.
HLTV is one of the best websites in esports, let alone Counter-Strike. Rating 3.0 was a huge step in the right direction as was Rating 2.1. The Top 20 list remains an invaluable enshrinement of the greatest players that have ever touched the game. The Awards Show is an excellent celebration that ties off every successive year with a brilliant celebration of Counter-Strike esports. But HLTV does need to be called out when it is messing up.
