‘Chiu on This’ is a short and regular opinion blast

I once talked about how I model CS:GO using a Dota 2 model where I extrapolate how many resources each player is given in a CS:GO game and from there figure out what each player is expected to do. So for those who don’t know, Dota 2 is a MOBA game where players kill creeps to get gold to buy items. There is a limited amount of gold on the map to farm, so a team has to make choices on who to give the gold to and so they came up with a numbering system from 1-5, with one being given the most gold and five being given the least.

CS:GO works out in a similar fashion, it’s why you never see two superstar AWPers on the same team. You can see a superstar AWPer and a hybrid player, but never two specialists. So using the role system, I can figure out approximately how much individual work a specific player should be giving out in terms of frags or impact in a singular game. For instance, if NiKo is having a bad game, he has essentially failed his team because he is being given the resources and therefore he must perform. In essence, the star player of any particular team gets the most credit, but also the most criticism if that particular player fails. In Dota 2, it works in a similar fashion. You will rarely see a 3 or 5 player being given criticism because those players are usually the ones being shafted. The 5 gets no gold, the 3 is sometimes left alone on an island to make do.

So if you are given the space, you must perform. However if a player is in a 3-5 role in CS:GO, that means that unless they do a horrendous job (like Edward), they will never need to play at the same level of the star players of their team and need only show up once in a while to prove their worth. So when you give out credit to a player, the player that should always be given the most is the guy who is forced to perform every match lest his team immediately fails (this is why I called this the s1mple era). So a book I read once that details this is Tim Grover’s book, Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable.

In it he describes three types of players: Coolers, Closers, and Cleaners. Or good players, great players, and unstoppable players. A good player does what they are told to do, they do their role and do it well. A great player is someone who can give you great results sometimes. A great player is someone who gives you the best results every time, a player who is relentless in their pursuit of victory.

There is a distinction to make between mentality and performance as someone can be relentless, but not get those same results (GeT_RiGhT in the modern era comes to mind, great mentality, but he isn’t giving out s1mple level performances, for instance). So when I name a player as the best, I have to point to how consistently must they perform to make sure they win. This is why I gave Coldzera such plaudits last year as game in and game out he was getting his. Conversely, I never gave FalleN as many plaudits because he was either the 3rd or 4th best player on the team depending on the timeline and never relentlessly gave the same performance.

A final thing to note is about confidence. Confidence is a tricky thing to explain, conceptualize, or validate as it changes from person to person. It is an intangible, but I like to use it to explain the difference between a star player and a good player. So the example I like to use is this great line I heard from Blitz in a Dota 2 cast and it’s something I used to do when I played Dota 2 cast. Basically what happens is that you die in the lane and everything is going wrong, but when you are dead and finish calling out any info, you immediately go to look at your carry players farm/items. The reason you do that is because it gives you confidence that it doesn’t matter how personally shit you or your team is doing, so long as your star player is doing well, you can win the game.

This mentality applies to any team sport. When the chips are down, when it looks over, their is a player on every top team that the team looks to to bail them out. That is the superstar and he is the one who gives confidence to the rest of the team. It’s also another reason why I put so many players above FalleN in 2017 as a better player, players like AdreN, HObbit, kennyS, k0nfig, EliGE, s1mple, GuardiaN, oskar. It is because when the chips were down for those players on their respective teams (except GuardiaN), every player on that team looked to them to man up and do it again and again. FalleN had the luxury to just have Coldzera and fer do the work.

That is a huge burden of pressure to be carrying, one that must be carried game in and game out. It’s why I rate star players on bad teams so highly because they get even less help than the stars on better teams.

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