Since the summer of 2016 HLTV has been handing out MVP medals for the big tournaments in Counter-Strike. Along with those medals comes a photo of the player holding the medal. Some of those photos are pure joy. Others are almost tragicomic, as the player lost the final but still won the MVP.
Throughout the years we have seen some absolutely insane tournament performances end in second place and an MVP medal. Those pictures tell stories about big personalities, monster performances and genuinely rough moments in a player’s career.
This article looks at three players who have all earned a “losing MVP”.
The first losing MVPs
The story starts with the first two losing MVPs that show up in HLTV’s records, and they almost came back to back. First at StarSeries i-League Season 4 and then shortly after at DreamHack Masters Marseille.
Maybe you remember DreamHack Masters Marseille as the event where Astralis really kickstarted their era, and that is part of the story. But 2018 as a whole was a special year for Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev. It was a year where his peak reached levels CS:GO had never really seen before.
It was the Ukrainian’s first time as HLTV’s #1 player of the year and the first year where he lifted multiple trophies with NAVI. He averaged a 1.32 rating at StarSeries and an absurd 1.52 at DreamHack Masters. For the entire year at big events his lowest rating was 1.19, which was basically unheard of at that point.
At this stage of his career s1mple was still a polarizing figure. Nobody doubted the raw skill or his superstar ceiling, but he was a young man who had not yet fully learned how to control his emotions. At big events in 2018 he averaged a 1.34 rating. What people did not know yet was just how far he would push that.
You see a player clearly above everyone else in the server, but still struggling to win trophies. While 2018 was a good year for s1mple, 2021 was the year where everything finally clicked and he turned that into a dominant era.
The start of a great career
From one cursed prodigy to the next. The second name on this list is the French superstar Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut, who also collected two losing MVP medals in the same year.
For ZywOo the two medals came at ESL One Cologne and DreamHack Masters Malmö in 2019. And while s1mple had an insane peak in 2018, the fact that ZywOo even managed to win tournaments in 2019 with that version of Vitality was already ridiculous.
On paper, a roster with a four man core of Happy, NBK-, RpK and apEX should not be winning EPICENTER or ECS Season 7. Yet in those tournaments ZywOo averaged a 1.53 and 1.43 rating and dragged them across the finish line anyway.
The years before he joined Vitality he put up wild numbers in the tier two and tier three scene, but very few could have predicted what came next. His first year in tier one with Vitality ended with two trophies and the year end HLTV #1 over s1mple, who finished second.
Since joining tier one ZywOo has never finished outside the top three in HLTV’s end of year ranking, taking #1 in 2019, #1 in 2020, #2 in 2022, #1 in 2023 and #3 in 2024.
Those Cologne and Malmö photos still look a bit cursed, but in hindsight they are just early chapters in the story of one of the greatest players to ever touch CS.
The new face of losing MVPs?
In 2025 we got another double package of losing MVPs in a single year. Ilya “m0NESY” Osipov picked up MVP at both ESL Pro League and BLAST Rivals.
In Hong Kong the Russian AWPer finished with a 1.42 rating, just above his 1.38 at Pro League. Both events ended with losses in the grand final. The first came against the best team of 2025, Vitality, who ended a four month trophy drought by winning ESL Pro League.
The second MVP arrived after a loss to FURIA in Hong Kong, a final most people will remember for how badly NiKo handled the pressure rather than anything else. m0NESY still walked away with the medal and the numbers to back it up, but not the trophy.
The funny part is that m0NESY is still only 20 years old, yet he already has a career many players would be happy to retire on. He has finished #7 in 2022, #4 in 2023 and #2 in 2024 on HLTV’s end of year list and has already won six trophies.
There have been other cases of players winning MVP without winning the tournament, but most of those are one offs. What these three names, s1mple, ZywOo and m0NESY, have in common is that they are true superstars. They either have been or could still be the best player in the world.
m0NESY still lacks the elusive Major trophy, but the Budapest Major looks like a real chance. If he takes a small step up, if Falcons finally fix their finals curse, and if FURIA lose a bit of momentum, those “losing MVP” photos might end up just like s1mple’s and ZywOo’s: painful in the moment, iconic in hindsight.
