Who is the best AWPer of all time?

There is no settled answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is picking a criterion and hiding it. On Majors won, dev1ce leads all AWPers with four, all with Astralis. On individual accolades, ZywOo has three Major MVP awards — the most of any player — and three Major titles with Vitality. On raw highlight-reel impact in a single era, kennyS in 2014–2015 is the usual answer.

Which AWPer has won the most Majors?

dev1ce, with four: ELEAGUE Major Atlanta 2017, FACEIT Major London 2018, IEM Katowice Major 2019 and StarLadder Berlin Major 2019 — every one of them with Astralis. He was also named MVP at two of them, London 2018 and Berlin 2019.

He is a hybrid. Liquipedia lists him as both rifler and AWPer, and that flexibility is the point — he could take the AWP when the round called for it and play a rifle role when it did not. Purists sometimes exclude him from AWPer lists for exactly that reason.

Did kennyS ever win a Major?

Yes, one: DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca 2015 with Team EnVyUs, where he was also named MVP. His reputation rests less on trophies than on inventing the aggressive, movement-heavy AWP style that early CS:GO had not seen before.

Who is the best AWPer in CS2 right now?

That is a form question, not a history question, and it changes month to month. Our live player leaderboard ranks current form from recent S- and A-tier match data rather than reputation, so it is the honest place to look.

Which great AWPers never won a Major?

GuardiaN is the standout. He reached three Major finals — DreamHack Cluj-Napoca 2015 and MLG Columbus 2016 with Natus Vincere, and ELEAGUE Major Boston 2018 with FaZe Clan — and lost all three, while being ranked the second-best player in the world for 2015.

Best AWPers in CS:GO and CS2 History

An argument, made honestly — with the criteria on the table instead of hidden

TL;DR

There is no single correct answer, so here is the basis. On Majors won, dev1ce leads every AWPer with four. On individual accolades at Majors, ZywOo leads with three Major MVPs — the most of any player — alongside three Major titles. On era-defining influence, kennyS changed how the weapon is played. Pick your criterion and you pick your answer.

Every all-time AWP list is an opinion wearing a lab coat. The lists that pretend otherwise tend to lean on numbers that were never comparable in the first place: ratings computed under different systems, across different eras, against fields of wildly different depth. A 2014 opening-kill rate and a 2026 one are not the same measurement.

So this page does something narrower and more defensible. It judges on three things that are matters of record rather than taste — Major titles, sustained dominance within an era, and signature moments and stylistic influence— and it says which of the three is doing the work in each case. Where a player's claim rests on a feeling rather than a fact, that is stated too.

Nothing here invents a statistic. Where a number appears, it is a Major result, a title count or an award, all of them publicly documented.

The case for dev1ce: the trophy argument

If the question is "who won the most while holding the AWP", the argument closes quickly. Nicolai "dev1ce" Reedtz won four Majors, all with Astralis: ELEAGUE Major Atlanta 2017, FACEIT Major London 2018, IEM Katowice Major 2019 and StarLadder Berlin Major 2019. He was named MVP at two of them — London 2018 and Berlin 2019.

What makes the case stronger than a raw count is that those four came inside a single, unbroken competitive project. Astralis were not a team that got hot; they were a team that industrialised winning, and dev1ce was the constant. The knock against him has always been that a great system flatters its sniper. The counter is that the system was built around the reliability of a player who almost never gave a round away.

The case for ZywOo: the individual-accolade argument

Mathieu "ZywOo" Herbaut has three Major titles, all with Team Vitality — the BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023, the BLAST.tv Austin Major 2025 and the StarLadder Budapest Major 2025 — and he has been named Major MVP three times, more than any other player has managed. He has also finished as HLTV's player of the year in 2019, 2020, 2023 and 2025.

The distinction between his case and dev1ce's matters. dev1ce's claim is that his team kept winning. ZywOo's is that he kept being the best individual player on the server at the biggest events, repeatedly, across two different competitive eras and through a long stretch when Vitality were not yet a Major-winning team. Those are different kinds of greatness and you can reasonably prefer either.

The case for kennyS: the influence argument

Kenny "kennyS" Schrub won exactly one Major, DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca 2015 with Team EnVyUs, taking MVP at the event. On trophies alone he does not belong near the top of this list. He is here anyway, and most people who watched the era will not argue.

What kennyS did was establish that the AWP could be an aggressive weapon. Before him the default read on the rifle was positional and patient — hold the angle, take the free pick, fall back. His style was movement-first: jumping shots, quick-scopes, repositioning mid-round, taking duels a passive AWPer would never accept. He placed in HLTV's top 20 in five consecutive years from 2013 to 2017, which is the evidence that this was not just highlights.

Practically every aggressive AWPer since is playing a refined version of a template he popularised. Influence is a legitimate criterion; it just needs saying out loud rather than being smuggled in as "impact".

The hybrid problem: s1mple

Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev is a permanent argument about definitions. Liquipedia lists his role as both rifler and AWPer, and that is accurate — his defining quality was that the weapon in his hands was a round-by-round decision rather than a job title. He won one Major, PGL Major Stockholm 2021 with Natus Vincere, and took MVP there, and he was HLTV's player of the year in 2018, 2021 and 2022.

Whether he counts as an all-time AWPer depends entirely on whether you are ranking specialists or ranking people who were exceptional with an AWP. Both readings are defensible. Excluding him from a specialist list is not a slight; including him on a "best with the weapon" list is not a stretch either.

The others with a real claim

JW — three Majors with Fnatic: DreamHack Winter 2013, ESL One Katowice 2015 and ESL One Cologne 2015. Alongside kennyS, the other early architect of wildly aggressive AWPing, and he did it on a team that won.
FalleN— two Majors, MLG Columbus 2016 with Luminosity and ESL One Cologne 2016 with SK Gaming, holding the AWP while also calling the game. Ranked second in the world for 2016. In-game leading and AWPing at once is a genuinely rare combination, and he is still competing — FURIA's roster in Valve's July 2026 standings lists him.
GuardiaN — no Major, three Major finals lost, and second-best player in the world for 2015. The clearest case that trophies and quality are not the same measurement.
sh1ro — Perfect World Shanghai Major 2024 with Team Spirit, and IEM Katowice XV World Championship in 2021 with Gambit before that. The stylistic opposite of kennyS: positional, patient, unusually hard to trade.
broky — PGL Major Antwerp 2022 with FaZe Clan, the first Latvian Major winner, and a case study in an AWPer whose value shows up in what the opposition cannot do rather than in highlights.
Skadoodle — ELEAGUE Major Boston 2018 with Cloud9, the first North American Major champions. One title, but a historically unrepeatable one.
w0nderful — PGL Major Copenhagen 2024 with Natus Vincere, won at 19.
m0NESY— part of the Team Falcons roster that won the IEM Cologne Major 2026, the organisation's first Major. Still early in a career that the trophy criterion will judge later.

How to read any list like this

Check what the writer is counting. Majors, MVPs, peak-year dominance and influence give four different orderings. A list that produces a confident number-one without naming its criterion has just hidden the assumption.
Distrust cross-era statistics. Ratings, opening-duel percentages and AWP kill counts are not comparable across a decade of rule changes, map pools, economy revisions and — since 2023 — a different game engine.
Separate the player from the system. A great AWPer on a great team accumulates trophies faster. That is a real advantage, not a fake one, but it is not the same as being individually better.
Use live data for "right now" questions. Historical greatness and current form are different queries. Our live player form leaderboard answers the second one from recent S- and A-tier match data, and Player Formshows how an individual's current level moves their team's win probability.

Where to go deeper

For the players still competing, our pro player database has the configs, crosshairs and gear behind the aim, and pro teams groups those settings by roster. For the competitive context — who is playing whom, and what is at stake — the esports hub, the live match tracker and the CS2 Major page cover the current cycle rather than the archive.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the best AWPer of all time?: There is no settled answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is picking a criterion and hiding it. On Majors won, dev1ce leads all AWPers with four, all with Astralis. On individual accolades, ZywOo has three Major MVP awards — the most of any player — and three Major titles with Vitality. On raw highlight-reel impact in a single era, kennyS in 2014–2015 is the usual answer.
Which AWPer has won the most Majors?: dev1ce, with four: ELEAGUE Major Atlanta 2017, FACEIT Major London 2018, IEM Katowice Major 2019 and StarLadder Berlin Major 2019 — every one of them with Astralis. He was also named MVP at two of them, London 2018 and Berlin 2019.
Is s1mple an AWPer?: He is a hybrid. Liquipedia lists him as both rifler and AWPer, and that flexibility is the point — he could take the AWP when the round called for it and play a rifle role when it did not. Purists sometimes exclude him from AWPer lists for exactly that reason.
Did kennyS ever win a Major?: Yes, one: DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca 2015 with Team EnVyUs, where he was also named MVP. His reputation rests less on trophies than on inventing the aggressive, movement-heavy AWP style that early CS:GO had not seen before.
Who is the best AWPer in CS2 right now?: That is a form question, not a history question, and it changes month to month. Our live player leaderboard ranks current form from recent S- and A-tier match data rather than reputation, so it is the honest place to look.
Which great AWPers never won a Major?: GuardiaN is the standout. He reached three Major finals — DreamHack Cluj-Napoca 2015 and MLG Columbus 2016 with Natus Vincere, and ELEAGUE Major Boston 2018 with FaZe Clan — and lost all three, while being ranked the second-best player in the world for 2015.