The AWPer of the year contest is wide open – and it probably isn’t ZywOo.
Mathieu ‘ZywOo’ Herbaut was the most decorated star player in 2025 in Counter-Strike 2 (CS2). Wielding the AWP, the most powerful and resource-heavy gun in the game, ZywOo helped Vitality win 2 Majors and a Grand Slam.
In their victorious campaigns, ZywOo was the sole MVP on Vitality. So, how could he not be the best AWPer of 2025? Especially considering that his main rival in 2025, Daniil ‘donk’ Kryshkovets, is not an AWPer.
The reality is that ZywOo uses the AK-47 and the other rifles more than he does the AWP.
On top of that, according to btrams and KingT, other players have been more effective with the AWP in 2025.
Less kills with AWP than rifles in 2025
Across 2025, ZywOo had about 40% more kills with rifles (1428) than he did with the AWP (1016).
If we compare that to some of his competitors, it shows how ZywOo is more of a rifle-AWP hybrid player than a pure AWPer.
Ilya ‘m0NESY’ Osipov is closest to ZywOo in the best player race in 2025, and had over 200 more AWP kills than him in 2025. He also had 11% more AWP kills than he had rifle kills.
For molodoy, FURIA’s AWP prodigy from Kazakhstan, the AWP is nearly always his weapon of choice. Nearly 60% of molodoy’s kills were with it, showing that his team depended on him specifically for his AWPing prowess.
Both of these players had more kills with the AWP than rifles, while with ZywOo, the trend goes the other way.
btrams: “With the AWP in his hands, [ZywOo] didn’t provide more value to his team than m0NESY or molodoy”
Even when looking at ZywOo’s performance stats with the AWP, it falls short of competitors in 2025. btrams, a CS2 stats pioneer, published his analysis on X, showing how m0NESY and molodoy were the most impactful with the AWP in their hands.
He helped summarize some of the findings for us.
“[ZywOo’s] expertise is spread around more than just the role of AWPer,” btrams said. “To make a football analogy, a player playing as a false 9 with 10 goals and 25 assists in a season probably shouldn’t win the striker of the year award.”
In this analogy, being a great AWPer is like being a great striker.
ZywOo is like a goal-scoring and assisting player, like Lionel Messi or Mesut Ozil, while molodoy and m0NESY would be the pure strikers like Luis Suarez or Robert Lewandowski.
Even so, players like Messi or Ozil can still be the best in a year, even if they were not the best strikers.
KingT, a Counter-Strike 2 analyst and content creator, also thought that m0NESY was the best AWPer this year.
“[m0NESY’s] playstyle is Uber satisfying and he’s been more effective with the AWP itself than everyone,” KingT said. “ZywOo may as well be a rifler on T-Sides due to his low usage and output.”
He also said that molodoy matched him a bit only at the end of year.
How ZywOo still might be the best “AWPer”
When asked if there is a case for ZywOo nonetheless, btrams said that he could be the best AWPer if we consider the role to just be a broad archetype.
“There is a case [for ZywOo], but it’s built mainly on treating AWPer more as a position archetype [rather] than finding the player best at using the gun itself,” btrams said.
He said it’s also conditional on considering “team success” above individual success.
If we take AWPer to mean just the best player with the AWP in their hands, btrams still assured that m0NESY and molodoy were his picks for 2025.
