Who Are the Best CS:GO Players of All Time?
Judged on the three records that actually exist — and with the AWP argument left where it belongs
There is no single answer, so here are the measurable ones. On Major titles, dupreeh leads everyone with five. On Major MVP awards, ZywOo leads with three, ahead of dev1ce and coldzera on two. On HLTV player-of-the-year finishes, ZywOo again leads with four, ahead of s1mple on three. Those three lists disagree with each other, and that disagreement is the honest answer.
Every all-time list is a criterion in disguise. Change the measure and you change the winner, so the only useful thing an article like this can do is put the measures on the table first and then say which one is doing the work in each case.
This page uses three, all of them matters of record rather than taste: Major championships won, Major MVP awards, and HLTV player-of-the-year finishes. Every title, award and ranking named below is taken from Liquipedia's Major records and HLTV's top-20 archive. Nothing here is a rating we invented, and there are no earnings figures, because prize-money totals are unreliable and say more about a schedule than a player.
One deliberate omission: the snipers. Ranking an AWPer against a rifler means comparing roles that produce completely different-looking numbers, and that argument deserves its own space. It has one — our best AWPers in CS:GO history page makes the case for dev1ce, ZywOo, kennyS and the rest on their own terms. This page is about the riflers, the leaders and the support players, and it does not re-run that debate.
The three records, side by side
Read across these three tables and you will notice that almost nobody appears at the top of more than one. That is the entire problem with the question.
| Measure | Leader | Behind them |
|---|---|---|
| Major titles | dupreeh — 5 | dev1ce, Xyp9x, gla1ve, Magisk, apEX — 4 each |
| Major MVP awards | ZywOo — 3 | dev1ce, coldzera — 2 each; everyone else 1 |
| HLTV player of the year | ZywOo — 4 | s1mple — 3; GeT_RiGhT, coldzera — 2 each |
The player with the most trophies has never been HLTV's number one. The player with the most individual awards is not close to the trophy lead. Any list that resolves this cleanly has quietly picked a favourite.
dupreeh: the trophy record nobody talks about
Peter "dupreeh" Rasmussen has won five Majors, more than any player in the game's history. Four came inside the Astralis run — Atlanta 2017, London 2018, Katowice 2019 and Berlin 2019 — and the fifth came years later and elsewhere, with Team Vitality at the BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023.
That fifth one is what separates him from his own teammates. Four players hold four titles apiece and three of them (dev1ce, Xyp9x, gla1ve) earned every one in the same shirt. The standard objection to Astralis-era résumés is that the system did the work; dupreeh is the awkward counter-example, because he left, joined a different core in a different era, and won again.
He was also the entry fragger throughout, which is the role that collects the least individual credit per trophy. He has never won a Major MVP — the award at Atlanta 2017 went to his teammate Kjaerbye. Five titles and zero MVPs is the clearest single illustration of how far apart these two measures sit.
coldzera: the peak-value argument
Marcelo "coldzera" David won two Majors, MLG Columbus 2016 with Luminosity and ESL One Cologne 2016 with SK Gaming, and took the MVP award at both. He was the first player to win MVP at two consecutive Majors — a feat nobody matched until ZywOo did it at Austin and Budapest in 2025.
He then finished as HLTV's number one player in 2016 and 2017, back to back. Two Majors, two Major MVPs and two player-of-the-year titles inside roughly eighteen months is the densest peak anyone has produced in this game. His career total of trophies is modest, and if you rank by trophies he is nowhere near dupreeh. If you rank by how completely one player owned a stretch of Counter-Strike, he is very hard to beat.
GeT_RiGhT and f0rest: the ones the record undersells
Christopher "GeT_RiGhT" Alesund won HLTV's player of the year in 2013 and 2014, the first two editions of the CS:GO era. His Major record shows one title, ESL One Cologne 2014 with Ninjas in Pyjamas, alongside Patrik "f0rest" Lindberg, Xizt, friberg and Fifflaren.
The trophy count badly undersells both of them, and it is worth understanding why rather than just asserting it. Majors did not exist before late 2013; NiP's most dominant period as a team predates most of the events a modern résumé counts. f0rest, meanwhile, was ranked in HLTV's top 20 in 2013 and 2016 among other years, and appears in the 2011 rankings from the previous game entirely. Both were near the top of the sport before the sport had built the trophies we now use to measure it.
This is the single strongest reason to distrust a pure trophy ranking. The measuring stick arrived late.
The Fnatic core: flusha, JW and pronax
Three players share three Majors each from the same project: Robin "flusha" Rönnquist, Jesper "JW" Wecksell and Markus "pronax" Wallsten, who won DreamHack Winter 2013, ESL One Katowice 2015 and ESL One Cologne 2015 with Fnatic. olofmeister and KRIMZ have two of those three, having joined after the first.
MVP awards from that run went to JW at DreamHack Winter 2013, olofmeister at Katowice 2015 and flusha at Cologne 2015 — three different players carrying three different finals for the same team. olofmeister was also HLTV's number one for 2015, which makes him the only member of that side with both a player-of-the-year title and multiple Majors.
pronax is the interesting name on that list. He has three Majors, no MVP and no top-20 finish, because he was the in-game leader. Every measure this page uses is blind to what he did, which is worth saying out loud rather than pretending the numbers cover everyone.
NiKo: ten years of being obviously great and not winning
Nikola "NiKo" Kovač appeared in HLTV's top 20 in every single year from 2016 through 2025, finishing second in 2017 and again in 2023. Over that decade he reached Major finals with FaZe at ELEAGUE Boston 2018 and with G2 at PGL Stockholm 2021, and lost both.
He finally won one at the IEM Cologne Major 2026, on a roster alongside karrigan, m0NESY, TeSeS and kyousuke. Before that, the standard line about him was that he was the best player never to win a Major — a sentence that says more about the limits of trophy-counting than it does about NiKo. His case is the mirror image of dupreeh's: enormous sustained individual level, almost no trophies for most of it.
The leaders: karrigan and apEX
In-game leaders are the blind spot in every ranking system, so they need naming explicitly.
- karrigan— two Majors, PGL Major Antwerp 2022 with FaZe and IEM Cologne Major 2026 with a completely different roster, four years apart. He also appears in HLTV's 2011 top 20, from the previous game. A player calling a winning Major in 2026 who was rated among the world's best in 2011 is a longevity record on its own.
- apEX — four Majors, and the only member of that four-title group who did not build them inside one project. He won DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca 2015 with Team EnVyUs, then the BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023 with one Vitality core, then the BLAST.tv Austin Major 2025 and the StarLadder Budapest Major 2025 with another. Three separate lineups, a decade apart.
Neither has a Major MVP, and neither ever will on the current award structure. If your ranking has no room for them, the ranking is measuring fragging, not Counter-Strike.
The modern names with a live claim
- donk — HLTV's number one player for 2024 and the MVP of the Perfect World Shanghai Major 2024 with Team Spirit, in what was effectively his first full year at the top. He finished second in 2025. Too early for a career verdict, early enough that the trajectory is the point.
- ropz — three Majors across two organisations: Antwerp 2022 with FaZe, then Austin 2025 and Budapest 2025 with Vitality. Top-20 finishes going back to 2018 without a single year that looks like a slump.
- Magisk — four Majors and the MVP at IEM Katowice 2019, with the same leaving-and-winning-again pattern as dupreeh, from Astralis to Vitality.
- s1mple— one Major, PGL Major Stockholm 2021, with the MVP, and HLTV's number one in 2018, 2021 and 2022. His case is argued properly on the AWP page, since Liquipedia lists him as both rifler and AWPer and the hybrid question is unavoidable there.
How to read any all-time list, including this one
- Find the hidden criterion. Trophies, individual awards, peak-year dominance and longevity produce four different orderings. A confident number one with no stated basis has just hidden its assumption.
- Do not compare statistics across eras. Ratings, opening-duel rates and headshot percentages span a decade of economy changes, map-pool churn, format changes and — since 2023 — a different engine.
- Remember the roles the awards cannot see. In-game leaders and dedicated support players do not accumulate MVPs. Their absence from an award table is a property of the table.
- Separate history from form. "Greatest ever" and "best right now" are different questions with different answers. Our live player rankings answer the second one from recent S- and A-tier match data, and Player Formshows how a player's current level shifts their team's win probability.
Where to go deeper
For the players still competing, the pro player database holds the configs, crosshairs and gear, and pro teams groups those by roster. For the competitive picture rather than the archive, the esports hub, the live match tracker and the CS2 Major page cover the current cycle, and team rankings handle the club side of the same argument.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Who has won the most Majors in Counter-Strike?
- Peter "dupreeh" Rasmussen, with five. Four came with Astralis — ELEAGUE Major Atlanta 2017, FACEIT Major London 2018, IEM Katowice Major 2019 and StarLadder Berlin Major 2019 — and the fifth with Team Vitality at the BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023. He is the only player on five.
- Which players have won four Majors?
- Five of them: dev1ce, Xyp9x, gla1ve and Magisk, plus apEX. The first four are Astralis products; apEX got there by a different route entirely, winning with Team EnVyUs in 2015 and then three more with Vitality in 2023 and 2025.
- Who has the most Major MVP awards?
- ZywOo, with three. Only two other players have more than one: dev1ce and coldzera, on two each. coldzera was the first to take MVP at two consecutive Majors, at MLG Columbus 2016 and ESL One Cologne 2016; ZywOo repeated that at Austin and Budapest in 2025.
- Who has been HLTV player of the year most often?
- ZywOo, four times — 2019, 2020, 2023 and 2025. s1mple has three (2018, 2021, 2022). GeT_RiGhT took the first two of the CS:GO era in 2013 and 2014, and coldzera won back-to-back in 2016 and 2017. donk won it in 2024.
- Has NiKo ever won a Major?
- Yes, but it took a decade. He appeared in HLTV’s top 20 every year from 2016 through 2025 and lost Major finals with FaZe in Boston 2018 and G2 in Stockholm 2021 before finally winning at the IEM Cologne Major 2026.
- Why are the AWPers not ranked on this page?
- Because they get their own argument. Judging snipers against riflers means comparing roles that are measured differently, so we keep that debate on a separate page rather than smuggling it in here.
Major titles, finals appearances and MVP awards taken from Liquipedia's Valve Major Championships player statistics. Player-of-the-year finishes taken from HLTV's top-20 archive as catalogued on Liquipedia.