REWIND: aizy's magnum opus - DreamHack Stockholm 2018

Birth of my child. Wedding day. First date with my wife. DreamHack Stockholm 2018.

In that order, if she asks.

I was a North fan. Well, before that I was an aizy fan (the name aizyesque wasn’t chosen at random), but I had an affinity for the style that MSL played and when aizy rejoined, it was a no-brainer to become a zealot for the greatest nearly-there team of all time.

What made this event so special was that it was a complete aligning of stars that never happened before or after; a one-off, special, miracle run that if your first experience of was this article, you’d assume I was making it up.

Sometimes, I think I must have done.

North came into Stockholm as they always did - always the punchline, never the puncher. Nobody - not even me - expected anything, not least because MSL was AWPing for the first time in his career having got vexed at every other AWPer he’d had to work with.

Bro said ‘pass me the ball I’ll do it then’.

niko (the Danish one) was standing in, and North were expected to do as they normally do. But someone had a bigger plan.

When people remember this tournament, it’s often accompanied by an eye-roll or heavy sigh and a ‘yes Elliott, I remember’, but they normally remember MSL as MVP. Understandable. Even MSL couldn’t believe it. It was about as likely as December sunshine in Manchester. What people should be remembering, as I’ve always said, was a superstar performance from aizy.

People always thought I was a blind fanboy when it come to my admiration for aizy, but he genuinely did have one of the highest peaks in world Counter-Strike. As a pure technician, mechanical skill alone, there have been very few players in the world as good as him, and I seriously mean that, all bias aside. The pistol clip against HEROIC is legitimately a top five round of all time, and you can’t be doing that without world class hands.

Stockholm was proof of what he could do when he was on it, and that he was one of a few players in history who has legitimately dragged a team to a tier one trophy. This team had MSL AWPing, niko standing-in and Kjaerbye who was pretty inconsistent as its star. valde will remain slander-free, because he was a truly excellent support player. They were all decent players, but they weren’t winning anything without divine intervention.

aizy said game.

The longest journey starts with a single step, and this one began with a routine win over TYLOO. Pretty simple stuff.

Next up, though, was the best team in the world and one of the greatest ever, Astralis, who proved to be no match for aizy. You might think I’m joking. You might think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. aizy was by a country mile the best player in the server and dragged North to a win over the best team in the world.

If this was s1mple or NiKo…

This was literally the best team ever at this point and aizy beat them single-handedly. If you want to make the argument of an AWPer being key to winning this game for North, you’re not naming MSL, let’s just say. We see you in the bottom left, device.

Interestingly the three maps played in this series would not be played in the grand final rematch. I’m getting ahead of myself.

aizy and valde once more topped the charts in terms of kills, but what was remarkable was that MSL managed to completely nullify s1mple. Both as an AWPer, and as a caller, he made s1mple’s life impossible and looked legitimately like a top tier AWPer in this game. s1mple failed to find an opening kill at any point, and MSL was roundly praised for it.

Rightly so - but aizy and valde were still the engines powering the win. aizy absolutely slaughtered NAVI where they stood. You can talk about the AWPers being worse than MSL all day long, but when they’re getting zipped up by your riflers all you have to do is not miss.

North were in the semi-finals, but then came the most memorable map of the tournament for them. In many ways, it’s fitting that even in North’s highest point, the most memorable map was them getting humiliated in a semi-final. MOUZ just straight 16-0’d them on Dust 2.

Nobody on the Danish side of things had a good game, as you might imagine, so this did little to harm or help anyone’s chances of MVP, but map two - despite the win - hurt aizy’s chances at MVP.

Though maybe it shouldn’t have bolstered MSL’s chances too much either.

This was a grind, but North stayed in it with a win on Inferno, and aizy had valde and MSL to thank for keeping him in the tournament on his first real off-map of the event. I was worried he might be choking, truthfully, but he came roaring back with another dominant third map.

valde and MSL might have had more kills, but aizy’s 5-0 opening kill scoreline made a massive difference in a game that finished 16-12. This semi-final was probably where MSL won the MVP - he was excellent in both North wins, and as always kept the opposition AWPer down, but aizy was crucial in the third map and valde probably should have gotten more credit.

As a pure player, valde probably deserved MVP more than MSL too.

And then came the grand final.

They say you always remember where you were when you found out about 9/11, or the death of Princess Diana, or when device joined NIP. For me, this was that moment. I was at my Grandma’s house, as I was every Sunday, but every word she said fell on deaf ears. I’d charged my phone so I could watch it unencumbered and ignore the outside world. Bless her.

Spiritually, I was in that arena. At this point, I wasn’t the financially independent adult I am now who would absolutely have gone, nor was I the employed journalist who would have gotten in for free. I was still under the illusion I could get a real job, in the real world, and esports was a fun escape.

I had to refrain myself from doing a Fortnite dance in her front room when North won.

Astralis picked into that Dust 2 weakness, and were smashed back to reality. Overnight, MSL had figured out the flaws and ran a gorgeous T side that saw aizy dancing out of long under the carpet of flashbangs that left Astralis’ defence cartoonishly blind time and time again, and MSL himself was mogging device. On an AWPers’ map, no less.

device wasn’t happy about that, and cut through North like a hot knife through I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter on Train, to set up Overpass as a decider. That one was marginally less one-sided than map one, but not by much.

And then: immortality.

I won’t lie to you, this map probably tipped it over the edge for MSL. Never in his life before or since has he come close to a 26 kill, 100 ADR map in a grand final. At 9-6 down going into the T side of Overpass it looked cooked, but MSL called an exceptional CT side while AWPing like s1mple to crush Astralis and bring home the trophy across to Denmark.

He won MVP off this map alone, because there’s no argument that aizy was better throughout the tournament, and so was valde. In fact, there’s not actually much of an argument he was better in the grand final.

With the benefit of hindsight, I finally have the data to prove what I knew all along and nobody believed me. aizy was capable of single-handedly winning a tier one trophy for his team, and this was proof of concept. He did. He was the best player on the best team, taking down Astralis on four of six maps while being incredibly destructive.

He should have won MVP. He should have. Perhaps he would’ve if I wasn’t so irritating.

aizy had his low lows, but his peaks were extraordinary, and that’s what kept me on the hook. This was the tournament I’d always known he had in him, and proof that I wasn’t entirely delusional when I spoke about his skill.

He was one of the most gifted mechanically ever, and this tournament should be talked about far more as one of the biggest carry jobs of all time.

I’ll die on that hill forever.