launders: s1mple is the 8th best player of 2023
As the curtains rise on 2023, Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyljev finds himself securing the eighth spot on the Counter-Strike Player of the Year list curated by renowned caster Mohan "launders" Govindasamy.
It’s been a year of change in the world of Counter-Strike. A new game has embarked to replace CS:GO while the landscape of CS is about to change with the elimination of partnership tournaments from 2025. But one of the biggest stories in the past year has not been about CS2 or Valve’s desire to change up the tournament structure for the next years. It’s been the fall of Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyljev.
The best player in the CS:GO era went through the year without winning anything on a struggling NAVI roster, that ended up transitioning into an international roster during the summer before s1mple made the decision to bench himself on the roster before the switch to CS2.
The Ukrainian is considered to be the best player of the world in both 2021 and 2022, but this year he ended up as the 8th highest-rated player of the year according to Mohan "launders" Govindasamy, who ranks the players in the world on his YouTube channel these days.
- Though he missed a fair few more shots, the stats still show that he may have decided that he's in the second half of his career or even the last quarter. But, he is still an elite top player. I honestly cannot tell myself that anyone below him on this list was smarter, more impactful, and more match-defining than he was, even if they had better stats or deeper runs with their teams. He was their best player on Na'Vi, as usual, and if he wanted to, he could supplant nearly every AWPer in tier one on their team. Some may see this as a low, and some may see this as a high. But, for me, s1mple potentially ends his career in a similar place to 2017, where he really demanded the attention of the CS world. Of course, we all hope that he will be back because for nearly 5 years, he showed us what the ceiling of the game was, and for that, he should be honored.
You can see who launders rank 4-20th in these two videos.
