ZywOo will win the CS:GO Player of the Year award

Given Team Vitality’s results in 2023 and the fact that they are constantly getting carried by one player, Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut will almost certainly win the CS:GO Player of the Year award this season.

Apart from him, there are very few players who can steal his medal. Arguably, either Nikola “NiKo” Kovac or Ilya “m0NESY” Osipov could claim the title in G2 Esports perform well enough in the last four months of the season.

So far, G2 won two important S-tier tournaments: IEM Katowice and IEM Cologne. At Gamers8, they finished 3^rd – 4^th. In every single case, the same two players shined. But apart from these individuals, it’s hard to think of anyone who could challenge ZywOo.

Unfortunately for Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev, this has not been his year. Natus Vincere continues to struggle and their new roster appears to be weaker than the previous one. The decision to get rid of both Denis “electroNic” Sharipov and Ilya “Perfecto” Zalutskiy was probably a bad one, but nothing is 100% clear yet.

💛🏆 pic.twitter.com/jLCu8JsKGg

— ZywOo (@zywoo) August 20, 2023

ZywOo’s performance this year

ZywOo was instrumental in Vitality’s first Major win, which happened in Paris three months ago. He received the title of MVP for that tournament and his stats speak for themselves. Just in the Grand Final alone he had 48 frags and just 28 deaths. His rating 2.0 was 1.54 in the most important match of the tournament. That’s class.

When he wasn’t the best player on his team, he was one of the top 3. And he always fragged a lot. Lotan “Spinx” Giladi once described his playstyle as being impossible to replicate. The level of ingenuity in each particular situation is so high that no manual can teach you how to do what he does.

ZywOo was a key player not just at BLAST.tv Paris Major. He helped Vitality to also win BLAST Premier: Spring Groups, IEM Rio, and now, Gamers8. At this final tournament, Vitality had to play against MIBR and three of the strongest teams in the world: Natus Vincere, G2 Esports, and ENCE.

In every single case, ZywOo played a significant role in his team’s success. In some cases, his score wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been simply because some of his teammates played incredibly well. But when he was required to step up, he certainly did.

Header: Team Vitality