To commemorate the start of a new calendar year we will be revealing a list of our Top 20 players of 2014 day by day starting from January 1.

2014 was a big year for CS:GO and you were able to follow every last bit of it right here on HLTV.org. To close it out we bring you our big series Top 20 players which will attempt to show you who were the biggest stars of the year.

We witnessed new stars rising up, super-teams being formed, different teams winning titles throughout the year and it resulted in a record number of candidates for the ranking – 36.

We analyzed even more statistics from all bigger LAN events than before, selected MVP and All-Star team for each of them, and still it was very difficult to determine the final ranking.

2014 also brought us 3 major tournaments - EMS One Katowice, ESL One Cologne and DreamHack Winter - whose top performers earned themselves extra credit beyond the overall yearly stats, and it should be no surprise that all 20 players on our list played in at least two, most of them in all three of these $250,000 events.

In the end we also took into account contribution to team success and contribution in big matches such as semi-finals and finals (or the last three matches in a double elimination tournament) and came up with the list that will be revealed over the next 20 days:

There will be 9 new names compared to last year, while some known faces despite great performances had to be left out due to the tough competition.

It's also important to note that while Hovik "⁠KQLY⁠" Tovmassian's performance would have been a solid candidate for the Top 20, he wasn't considered due to his VAC ban.

A few more clues for those trying to guess the ranking: 6 of the 20 players had over 0.10 AWP kills per round, 16 attended at least one of ESEA's three events, 17 were at Gfinity 3 and 14 at FACEIT League Season 2 Finals.

This year the ranking will be brought to you by Xtrfy, who decided to partner up with us for the series. We hope you will enjoy the ride for the next 20 days and don't be afraid to post your own Top 20 list or criticize and analyze ours. Happy holidays from HLTV.org!