When organizations build a new Counter-Strike roster, they usually begin with firepower. They search for a star AWPer, an explosive entry fragger or a player capable of taking over an important series. That approach can produce an exciting lineup. It does not necessarily produce a functioning team.
A great rifler can win rounds. A great in-game leader decides how the other four players are used, which personalities fit together, how the team responds to pressure and whether individual talent develops into something greater. That is why Kamil “siuhy” Szkaradek should now be one of the most valuable players available on the Counter-Strike market.
Liquid moved the Polish captain to the bench after 15 months, ending a disappointing period for both sides. It was the first stage of siuhy’s career in which his team consistently failed to meet expectations. However, judging him only by Liquid would mean ignoring everything that made him such an attractive leader in the first place.
He is an experienced tier-one IGL, a three-time tournament winner with MOUZ, a Major finalist with GamerLegion and a proven developer of young players. Despite being only 23, siuhy already has the career record of a veteran captain.
An Academy Leader, Not Just an Academy Player
Siuhy’s value begins with the way he entered the professional scene. Many young players graduate from academy teams because their aim is already good enough for tier-one Counter-Strike. Siuhy emerged from MOUZ NXT with a different skill set. He was not simply another talented prospect waiting for an experienced captain to give him instructions. He was already responsible for building the system around the other prospects.
With siuhy calling, MOUZ NXT won four consecutive seasons of the WePlay Academy League between 2021 and 2022. That team also included torzsi and xertioN, while sycrone worked as its coach. Several members of the project later became established tier-one players.
This part of his career matters because academy Counter-Strike requires more than preparing anti-strats for the next opponent. Young players are inconsistent. They need clearly defined responsibilities, confidence and enough freedom to discover what kind of players they can become.
Siuhy learned how to lead while developing alongside his teammates. He understands the mistakes young players make because he made the same mistakes with them. For an organization trying to create a roster around prospects rather than purchase five established names, that experience is extremely difficult to replace.
GamerLegion: Building Something Without Established Stars
Leaving MOUZ NXT for GamerLegion was siuhy’s first major test. He was no longer operating inside one of Counter-Strike’s strongest development systems. GamerLegion’s international roster did not contain established tier-one superstars. There was potential, but very little evidence that the lineup could compete for the biggest trophies.
Within months, the team qualified for two consecutive Majors. At the second of them, the BLAST.tv Paris Major, GamerLegion produced one of the most unexpected runs in the history of the competition. Siuhy’s team reached the playoffs and then defeated Monte and HEROIC to advance to the grand final. They eventually lost to Vitality, but finishing second at a Major completely changed the careers of almost everyone involved.
Siuhy was not simply being carried through that run, either. Across 12 maps at the Paris Major, he recorded a 1.04 rating while calling for a roster that entered the event without a single established tier-one superstar.
It would be wrong to pretend siuhy did everything alone. Mihai “iM” Ivan delivered an extraordinary individual tournament and became one of the Major’s biggest stars. The rest of the roster also performed above expectations. But that is precisely the point.
Siuhy did not require five famous players to construct a competitive team. GamerLegion created an environment in which previously unproven players could produce the best Counter-Strike of their careers on the biggest stage available. Every IGL looks capable when his superstar wins every opening duel. Siuhy first built his reputation by helping players become stars. He was only 20 years old when GamerLegion reached the Major final. By that point, he had already proven that he could build a competitive system, improve the players around him and remain individually effective on the biggest stage in Counter-Strike.
MOUZ: Proof That It Was Not a Fluke
The Paris run earned siuhy a return to MOUZ, this time as the leader of the main roster. The move reunited him with several people from the academy project, but the expectations were completely different. MOUZ were not searching for a respectable result from a development roster. They wanted to compete consistently against the best teams in the world.
Siuhy delivered. During his 18 months in charge, MOUZ won ESL Pro League Season 18, ESL Pro League Season 19 and BetBoom Dacha Belgrade. The team also reached three additional finals and ended 2024 with a semi-final appearance at the Shanghai Major.
At ESL Pro League Season 19, MOUZ defeated Vitality 3-0 in the final to defend their title. Those results were not achieved while siuhy was completely sacrificing his own game. He recorded a 1.04 rating during MOUZ’s title run at ESL Pro League Season 18 before producing the best individual Big Event of his career at Season 19, where he averaged a 1.21 rating across 15 maps. He also posted a 1.08 rating at the BLAST Premier World Final 2023 and 1.04 during MOUZ’s run to the Shanghai Major semifinals.
The roster was young, aggressive and occasionally inconsistent in front of large arena crowds, but it was also clearly one of the strongest teams in the world. Siuhy had now produced results in three different environments: an academy, an underdog international lineup and a tier-one contender.
His removal in January 2025 was therefore one of the most surprising roster moves of the season. MOUZ publicly cited differing visions for the team’s direction. Sycrone later said that his own disagreements with siuhy had been professional rather than personal and that the decision had developed over a longer period. At the time of the move, MOUZ were ranked fifth in the world.
However, the official explanation did not reveal how suddenly the situation had escalated inside the roster. Jimpphat later described a major argument between two players following an online defeat to BetBoom at BLAST Bounty 2025 Season 1:
Our last game with siuhy was an online qualifier against BetBoom. After we lost, two players had a massive argument over some in-game issues. It remained unresolved and carried over into the next day
Then we were simply informed that siuhy had been benched and that someone else would have to take over the IGL role. There was not really any discussion with the team. What upset me most was that I had previously been told we were not going to change our IGL, but then it happened anyway. I felt a little betrayed.”
The argument appears to have been the immediate trigger, but it does not fully explain why MOUZ were willing to remove the captain of a top-five team so quickly. The decision suggests that deeper disagreements about the direction of the project had already been building behind the scenes.
Either way, siuhy was not benched because he had failed to produce results. His MOUZ tenure had already proven that he could lead a young roster into title contention. However, the episode still raises an important question about his leadership: building a successful team requires not only tactical ideas, but also compromise and the long-term management of relationships inside the roster.
The Liquid Failure
Siuhy’s time in Liquid cannot be dismissed as nothing more than an unfortunate stop in an otherwise successful career. He initially joined the organization on loan in April 2025 before the move was made permanent two months later. Liquid hoped that a proven young captain could finally provide the structure and identity that several previous versions of the roster had failed to establish.
Instead, the team continued to change players, struggled to develop a consistent style and repeatedly exited tournaments earlier than expected. Liquid never became a convincing title contender under siuhy, and by the end of his tenure, they were struggling not only at elite events but also against considerably weaker opposition.
The decline was visible in siuhy’s individual numbers as well. His annual Rating 1.0 fell from 0.95 in 2023 and 0.89 in 2024 to 0.81 in both 2025 and 2026. Several of the lowest-rated Big Events of his career also came during his time with Liquid, including 0.68 ratings at Esports World Cup 2025 and IEM Cologne 2025, although those performances came across samples of only two and four maps respectively.
After being moved to the bench, siuhy did not attempt to present the period as anything other than a major setback.
It was definitely the toughest year of my Counter-Strike career. Now it is time to reset and get back on the right track
He was not merely an innocent passenger on a dysfunctional team. Siuhy had more than a year to impose his ideas, improve Liquid’s structure and make better use of the players available to him. The roster often appeared disconnected, predictable and short of confidence, while its T sides remained one of its clearest weaknesses. For those problems, the in-game leader must accept a meaningful share of the responsibility.
His former MOUZ teammate torzsi offered a similarly critical assessment of the situation:
I am sure Liquid had their reasons for benching siuhy and choosing a new IGL. From my perspective, I would assume that he did not use the roster he had in the best possible way. Now he needs to work on himself a little before returning to the top
The numbers support at least part of that criticism. Three of siuhy’s four lowest-rated Big Events came during his Liquid tenure, while the team failed to reach a single elite-level final with him. Liquid should therefore be treated as a genuine failure in his career, not something that can be explained away entirely by poor circumstances.
Still, siuhy’s shortcomings do not fully explain why the project failed. Liquid’s problems existed long before his arrival. The organization had already cycled through different captains, coaches, star signings and roster concepts without finding lasting stability. Siuhy was brought in to repair that environment, but he entered a team that did not even have a permanent coach in place.
YNK argued that the timeline of the move perfectly illustrated the deeper issues inside Liquid’s Counter-Strike division:
The timeline of siuhy’s time in Liquid perfectly illustrates what has been wrong with their Counter-Strike division for years. He initially joined on loan in April 2025, when the team did not even have a coach. He was signed permanently two months later, right before the Major, and they still had no coach. A year later, he was gone
That context matters. Liquid did not place siuhy into a stable structure and ask him to improve it. They expected a 22-year-old captain to help create the structure while simultaneously leading a roster that was already under enormous pressure to produce immediate results.
Mauisnake was even more direct in his defence of the Polish IGL:
Siuhy inherited a Team Liquid that had not won a big trophy in more than 2,555 days. His only flaw was that he failed to rescue a ship that was already sinking. In other words, the Titanic had already hit the iceberg and needed a lifeboat. Siuhy was not the iceberg
The truth is somewhere between the two interpretations. Siuhy did not create Liquid’s long-standing problems, but he also failed to solve them. He did not make the best possible use of the roster, his individual level declined and the team never came close to meeting expectations. For the first time in his career, a project under his leadership consistently moved in the wrong direction.
But one unsuccessful team should not become the definitive evaluation of his ability. Liquid represents one chapter of siuhy’s career, while MOUZ NXT, GamerLegion and MOUZ provide a much larger body of evidence. In those three environments, he developed young players, built an underdog Major finalist and turned an inexperienced tier-one roster into a team capable of winning multiple trophies.
The relevant question is not whether siuhy failed at Liquid. He did. The question is whether that failure exposed the limits of his leadership or placed him in a project that was never properly constructed around his strengths. Everything he achieved before Liquid suggests that another organization should be willing to find out.
The Most Important Number Is 23
The most remarkable part of siuhy’s career is not simply the Major final or the trophies. It is how early all of them happened. At 23, siuhy already has the experience of a veteran IGL.
Very few available captains combine this amount of high-level experience with so much room to develop further.
Siuhy is still young enough to improve tactically and personally. Even during his successful MOUZ period, he spoke about working with the team’s coach and a sports psychologist to become a better leader rather than treating his early results as proof that he had already mastered the role.
That gives his next organization something rare: experience without the usual age-related limitations. Signing a veteran captain can stabilize a team for one or two seasons. Signing siuhy could establish its identity for the next five years.
Start With the IGL
There will be safer individual signings on the market. There will be riflers with better statistics and players whose most recent results look far more impressive.
None of those individually stronger signings would give a new project the same structural foundation. Siuhy has already shown that he can take inexperienced players and give them structure. He has shown that he can lead an unfancied roster to a Major final. He has shown that he can turn a young tier-one lineup into a team capable of winning multiple trophies.
Liquid showed that he cannot automatically fix every broken project. No IGL can. His next team will need a coaching staff that shares his vision, players willing to commit to his system and management prepared to build patiently rather than change direction after every disappointing event. For James Banks, the decisive factor in siuhy’s next project will be the environment built around him:
From MOUZ NXT to GamerLegion and then back to MOUZ, it is impossible not to be impressed by what siuhy has achieved
Things at Liquid never worked out the way anyone expected them to, but I am certain that, with the right people and the right environment around him, Kamil still has a great deal to offer.” But an organization that genuinely wants to create a new Counter-Strike team should not begin by asking which superstar is available. It should begin by deciding who can make five players function together. Right now, there is no better answer than siuhy.
