Four of the 10 nominees will be inducted in Belgrade on 9 January 2027, and NEO is on the list for the first time after the rule that kept coaches out was scrapped.
HLTV has announced the 10 nominees for the Counter-Strike Hall of Fame Class of 2026, with Peter “dupreeh” Rasmussen, Kenny “kennyS” Schrub and Filip “NEO” Kubski the biggest modern names on a ballot that also reaches back to the first years of the game. Four of them will be inducted at the HLTV Awards in Belgrade, Serbia, on 9 January 2027.
dupreeh is on the ballot for the second time after missing out last year. He is the only player to have attended all 19 CS:GO Majors and won five of them, four with Astralis between 2017 and 2019 and one with Team Vitality in Paris in 2023. HLTV counts 32 notable event wins and seven Top 20 placings, and he already picked up a lifetime achievement award at the Esports Awards last year.
kennyS is nominated for the third time, having been passed over by the committee in both 2024 and 2025. The Frenchman retired in May 2023 with 10 MVP awards and five Top 20 appearances, plus one Major title, DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca 2015 with Team EnVyUs. HLTV writes that his dominance with the AWP “is said to have played a part in Valve’s nerf of the weapon”.
NEO is the headline newcomer. The Pole was kept out until this year by what HLTV itself calls the “NEO rule”, which stopped a player being inducted for his playing career while he was still active elsewhere in the game, such as coaching. The rule was repealed in the summer, and the Astralis coach now joins the ballot as the one nominee with a case in both eras: voted Player of the Decade for the 2000s by HLTV’s users, the site’s best player of 2011, three WCG titles, two ESWC titles and two IEM World Championships in 1.6, then a Major title with Virtus.pro at EMS One Katowice 2014, two MVP awards and 11 notable trophies in CS:GO. He has since added four trophies as a coach.
The other seven nominees
Ronald “Rambo” Kim, first nomination
Ola “elemeNt” Moum, second nomination
Keun-Chul “solo” Kang, second nomination
Abdisamad “SpawN” Mohamed, second nomination- Jorgen “XeqtR” Johannessen, second nomination
- Danny “fRoD” Montaner, third nomination
- Kyle “Ksharp” Miller, third nomination
Rambo is the only other first-timer. elemeNt, solo, SpawN and XeqtR all return after being left out of last year’s class, while fRoD and Ksharp have now been nominated every year the Hall of Fame has existed.
Who got in before them
The inaugural Class of 2024 was all Swedish: Potti, HeatoN, f0rest and GeT_RiGhT. In January, cogu, markeloff and olofmeister were inducted as the Class of 2025, a class of three. Under the eligibility rules HLTV overhauled ahead of these nominations, a CS:GO or CS2 player must have gone 18 months without a big event and a year off any main roster before he can be nominated.
The 12-person committee that picks the class includes Chad “SPUNJ” Burchill, Jason “moses” O’Toole, Stephanie “missharvey” Harvey, Tommy “Potti” Ingemarsson, himself a 2024 inductee, and Dmitry “hooch” Bogdanov, who joined the panel this year. The four who make it get a ceremony on stage at the HLTV Awards, a Rolex with a Hall of Fame inscription, a special HLTV player profile, a place on the Hall of Fame page and an article and video about their career.
Where all 10 sit in the game’s history, you can judge for yourself in our list of the greatest Counter-Strike players of all time.
