July 17, 2026
Edited by Stoyan Ovcharov and Karl Mikael Cakste

Hi, your friends at Challengermode know you like CS. CS BUZZ is the twice-weekly newsletter for people who live and breathe Counter-Strike. CS BUZZ RETRO (On Fridays) revisits the moments that made CS what it is. CS BUZZ NOW (On Tuesdays) lists what the community's talking about right now.

Ten years ago last week, an 18-year-old dropped out of Heaven and no-scoped fnatic twice in the same round. Team Liquid walked into a Major final that no North American team had ever reached. Valve put an angel on the wall.

It is Round 14 on Cache, and Team Liquid are not supposed to be here.

The Lanxess Arena is full. It is the semifinal of ESL One Cologne 2016, the ninth CS:GO Major, and the bracket has gone strange. Liquid, a North American side the community gave under a 20 percent chance, have already taken Cobblestone off fnatic, the most decorated roster the game has ever produced. Now they are tearing through Cache, leading 9-4 in a dominant first half that they are on track to close out 11-4.

Then the round falls apart. Liquid trade down until one Ukrainian is left alone on the B site against two fnatic players, holding the one weapon nobody wants for a close-quarters site defence situation: an AWP.

Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev is just 18 years old. He is up in Heaven, the raised platform above the site, jiggling for information. dennis and KRIMZ are somewhere in the room below him, ready to trade each other's kills the instant Liquid shows up. So s1mple does the thing every coach tells you never to do. He jumps.

Falling, no scope, he clicks once, and dennis is dead before s1mple lands. KRIMZ hears the shot but not the drop. He peeks Heaven, aiming at the platform s1mple has already left. By the time he corrects, s1mple has flicked clear across the room and no-scoped him too, a second impossible shot at a distance that made no sense.

On the call, James Bardolph comes apart: "You can't do that, s1mple!" Two bullets, two no-scopes, a 1v2 closed with the worst gun in the bag. Liquid take the round, then the map 16-13, then the series 2-0. For the first time in the history of the game, a North American team is standing in a Major grand final.

Valve would carve the moment into the map itself.

To understand why the arena lost its mind, you have to remember who was on the other side. fnatic were the New England Patriots of Counter-Strike, a franchise three Majors deep and stacked with olofmeister, KRIMZ, JW, flusha, and their heavy-hitting newer addition dennis. Liquid were the interlopers, a revamped North American roster led by veteran Spencer "Hiko" Martin, with nitr0, EliGE and jdm64 around a teenage stand-in from Kyiv. Nobody expected them to be in Cologne this long.

s1mple was the wildcard. Eighteen, absurdly gifted, and already carrying a reputation as difficult to keep on a team. He had moved to the United States in early 2016 to join Liquid, a stint that would last under six months before homesickness sent him home. Cologne was near the end of it, and he spent the tournament reminding everyone what the fuss was about.

The Brazilian ghost was already in the building. Three months earlier at MLG Columbus, the same core that now wore SK jerseys, then Luminosity, had knocked Liquid out of the semifinals, powered by coldzera's own airborne no-scope, the flying four-kill on Mirage that also earned a Valve graffiti. Liquid had unfinished business, and s1mple's clutch felt like the reply.

It reached only so far. In the grand final, an all-Americas showdown and the first Major final in history without a European team, SK closed the door 2-0. Liquid, the first North American team ever to reach that stage, went home as runners-up. The trophy went to Brazil. The moment stayed with s1mple.

The falling no-scope told the world exactly how good s1mple already was at 18. What it did not tell anyone was how long the wait would be. He left Liquid within weeks, joined Natus Vincere in August 2016, and did not lift a Major trophy until PGL Stockholm in 2021, five years later, when Na'Vi ran the table without dropping a single map, and he took the MVP. Genius arrived on schedule. Silverware did not.

He had the time to scope KRIMZ. The safe shot, the correct shot, was right there. He no-scoped anyway. That refusal of the sensible option is exactly why the round outlived the scoreline, and it became a signature. Over the next decade, HLTV would rank him the best player in the world in 2018, 2021 and 2022, and the highlight reel kept looking like this one.

The run ended in defeat, and the trophy left with SK. None of that touched the play. Valve honored it with a graffiti under Heaven, a winged CT descending with a scopeless AWP, designed by de_cache co-creator FMPONE. It lived on the wall for years. When Cache returned in Counter-Strike 2 in March 2025, the graffiti was gone, but by then the clip had long since escaped the map. The result faded. The falling angel did not.

That's the play they built a graffiti for. Two bullets, no scope, and a teenager who jumped when everyone told him to hold.

See you Tuesday — Buzzing.

Stoyan Ovcharov, Karl Mikael Cakste & The CS Buzz Team

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