A brief statistical comparison between the two best rookies of CS:GO/CS2.
Both of these prodigies are the two best players of 2025 according to most of the community. But they’re also both contenders for having the best individual first year ever of professional play.
In 2019, ZywOo’s rookie year, he was ranked #1 player in the world by HLTV and also by Duncan ‘Thorin’ Shields, a veteran analyst known as “the Esports Historian”.
In 2024, donk also received the same award from HLTV in his rookie year, and praise from the aforementioned Thorin that he “might be the best player in the history of CS” in September 2024.
Here is a brief overview of what they each did in their first year as a pro (stats courtesy of HLTV):
| ZywOo (2019) | donk (2024) | |
| Kills per Round (KPR) | 0.82 | 0.90 |
| Deaths per Round | 0.62 | 0.68 |
| Opening Kill Attempt % | 23.6% | 28.4% |
| Opening Kill Success % | 61.8% | 54.3% |
| Last Alive Percentage | 11.8% | 6.2% |
| 1v1 Win Percentage | 75% | 43.8% |
| Average Damage per Round | 85.2 | 94.8 |
(against top 20 on LAN)
The best aggressive rifler in history
Daniil ‘donk’ Kryshkovets is perhaps the biggest statistical anomaly in CS history. His 0.9 KPR in 2024 is a near 17% increase from the next highest aggressive rifler in 2024, EliGE.
As an aggressive rifler, his opening stats are incomparable. EliGE and XANTARES, the next highest aggressive riflers, have a similar success rate with 3 percentage points less of attemps.
A safe pair of hands in the clutch
ZywOo all the same had great opening stats in 2019, but the fact that he was an AWPer made it much less of an anomaly. Device, an elite AWPer in 2019, had a 60.7% success rate and a 22% attempt rate himself, only slightly below ZywOo.
ZywOo was a formidable clutcher in 2019 – one of donk’s weak points by being a hyper-aggressive opener. Winning 75% of 1v1s is an incredible anomaly that shows ZywOo’s class.
