I don’t watch many Counter-Strike: Global Offensive professional matches or tournaments or whatever, but even I find Sergey “Ax1Le” Rykhtorov’s amazing one-shot kill during a recent CS:GO tourney incredible. In fact, even if you’ve never played CS:GO, it’s really something to see…assuming you can even see it! Ax1Le’s one-shot kill is so fast most folks watching missed just how cool it was when it first occurred.
Valve’s wildly popular tactical shooter CS:GO has been around for a while now first released all the way back in 2012. In the decade since, the game has only grown as Valve continues to update it year after year with new content. And for most of that decade, Valve’s shooter has been one of the most popular esport games around. While there exist many CS:GO tournaments, the most prestigious and popular are the Valve-sponsored Major Championships, aka the Majors, which pay out millions in prize money and are extremely popular online. And it was during the most recent Major event that Ax1Le pulled off his wild one-shot drop kill.
It went down yesterday, during a round-five match of the IEM Rio Major 2022 Challengers Stage on the Mirage map. CS:GO pro and Cloud9 team member Ax1Le was stalking around bombsite B as a terrorist. Suddenly, he spots two counter-terrorists and did what anyone else in that moment would do: leap out of a window and pull off an impressive, split-second one-shot kill with such a tiny margin of aim error that upon replay, it almost appears he’s shooting through the wall. OK, maybe not something anyone would do…
The moment goes by so fast that initially the commentators weren’t really sure what just happened. But after the round ended, a slow-motion replay helped better show off just how incredible Ax1Le’s shot really was, and had both the commentators screaming “What!?” at the same time.
Sure, he died seconds after making that cool shot, but his team ended up winning that round of CS:GO, so it all sort of balances out in the end. And regardless of whether Cloud9 can make it to the finals — the tournament is still ongoing — he can always point to that incredible, one-of-a-kind shot and go, “That was me.”
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