Player of the Month – s1mple

Antoan Vasilev | 2018-06-05 |

The weather outside is getting warmer since spring is already upon us. Of course, as usual, it is time for our Player of the Month article!

April was pretty intense in terms of eSports events and it was really hard to distinguish the most valuable player among all participants.

The CS:GO Asia Summit was held in Beijing, China, on the 2nd of April, the London Games Festival went from the 5th until 15th, and then eSports enthusiasts had the chance to attend the Sports Pro Live. The last event was also one of the most interesting – the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Masters Marseille, organized by Dreamhack.

We chose the Masters Marseille to determine our April Player of the Month. He is not only one of the best in the world, but also one of the most popular players with a nice attitude.

You still don’t have a clue?
We are speaking about one of the most entertaining CS:GO AWPers and entry fraggers in the world.

Yeah, exactly! We present to you our April Player of the Month, Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev of Natus Vincere.

Player of the Month – s1mple

Recognizing s1mple as one of the best in the world for April was a simple task. He led his team through some intense battles at Dreamhack Marseille and even though the team finished as a runner-up to Astralis, s1mple was way above all opposing players at an individual level.

He was at the top of the event charts in 12 categories, including damage per round (99.4), kills per round (1.00), rounds with at least one kill (62.8%), and opening frags per round (0.18). Moreover, s1mple was one of the hardest players to kill, ending the event with an average of 0.60 deaths per round, and five successful 1vsX situations.

To be more precise in our analysis we will compare Oleksandr stats to the rest of his teammates, not only for Dreamhack, but for the whole month.

As it’s clear from the infographic, s1mple was way ahead of the rest of his teammates in April. With a rating of 1.45, he was very close to his personal best monthly performance. The only one who was close to him in terms of rating was Denis “electronic” Sharipov with 1.35. It is good to mention that electronic and Egor “flamie” Vasilyev both played for Russia and they had more matches than the rest of the squad.

Player of the Month – Tournaments

Besides Dreamhack Marseille, s1mple played for Na’Vi in some of the regular events such as the ESL Pro League and ECS. The best rating made by Oleksandr was at ECS when he was a stand-in for mousesports against the Polish Virtus.Pro. There, s1mple achieved a 1.86 rating, which is really amazing.

S1mple History

Oleksandr started his career back in 2013 with the Ukrainian team LAN DODGERS, where he was discovered in early 2014, after his incredible plays in some of the online competitions like StarSeries.

In mid-September 2014, s1mple saw his career briefly elevated as he signed for team HellRaisers and played alongside stars such as Mikhail “Dosia” Stolyarov and Yegor “markeloff” Markelov. Kostyliev’s first international achievement was at DreamHack Winter 2014. Two months later, the Ukrainian was caught cheating and was banned from all ESL tournaments in 2015. Hellraisers parted ways with him at this time. His ban later expired in February, 2016.

Oleksandr bounced from team to team for a while. For a small period, he was part of the Ukrainian Flipsid3 Tactics team. However, he left the squad on July 17, 2015, following internal problems. He then announced he would be going inactive for the time being, but joined Evolution (Evolution.Dark) just a few days later. This lasted a month before the team was let go and later, he joined team Liquid and made his way back to the big competitive scene. Nowadays, Oleksandr is part of team Natus Vincere, motivated and ready to conquer new eSports heights.