The Importance of Veterans in CSGO
In Counter Strike, the composition of your team is just as important as the players on it. A team composed of the top five players in the world based purely on their ability to frag likely wouldn’t be as good as someone like Astralis, who has a system and players who fit their roles to perfection. (Just look at some of the early iterations of FaZe. They had some of the most stacked rosters in CS history, and still fell short routinely until they added an IGL and a support player.)
Usually the balance of players on the roster is simple. Most CS players would want a star carry, an AWPer, and IGL, a support player, and an entry. What gets much harder to consider is the kinds of players that are going to fill those roles. A team in the upper echelon of CS will need high energy players, low energy players, veterans, younger guys, etc.
Seemingly one of the most important parts of a top tier team is a balance of experience, veteran players, and young up and comers. This philosophy shows up time and time again in the great teams throughout Counter Strike history, and it clearly works well, as you’ll see.
ENCE
The most recent (and obvious) example is ENCE. If CSGO had a ranking system for prospects, sergej would be up at the top. He’s an incredible young talent and it looks like he’s going to catapult ENCE into contention for titles in the near future, and he’s only 16.
Building your team around a 16-year-old is risky. He’s young and inexperienced, he’s going to have bad games, he’s going to make mistakes and play dumb sometimes. And that’s why you have allu on the roster. Having that veteran presence is what makes this team so good. Allu and Aerial are able to mentor sergej and back him up, in game and out of game.
Whenever sergej has a bad game his teammates are there to pick up the slack, and when he has a great game they are there to facilitate him. This roster is pretty much perfect, and I’m excited to watch them develop. I hope they keep this roster and let its run its course, because things could start to get even easier for ENCE.
Cloud9
The C9 roster that won Eleague Boston was constructed pretty similarly, albeit a little more unevenly. Their only real veteran was Skadoodle, as he was the only won to have real international LAN experience. The rest of their team was young, tarik and Stewie2k especially.
This showed in the way that they played, both because their best players were young and because tarik was IGLing. They played fast and loose, relying on their aim and pushing for big individual plays. They played around smokes and applied pressure to FaZe in the grand finals, forcing them into uncomfortable spots.
If you subscribe to the theory of the importance of veterancy, like I do, it won’t surprise you who top fragged in the Major finals. Skadoodle came through in the biggest spot and put up 79 frags over three maps, winning the Major MVP.
The experience becomes exponentially more important as the stage gets bigger, in large part due to how different playing at a LAN like that is. Veteran players are better at handling the crowd, the spotlight, the big moment than they younger players are. They can act as a steadying voice in events like that and are often instrumental in big event wins.
Gambit
The Zeus-led iteration of this team is the inverse of the Cloud9 team I just talked about. Every player on Gambit had been active since before 2009, except for Hobbit. I think this worked especially well due to Zeus’ style of in-game-leading. He was surrounded by veterans who knew how to execute to perfection, and play smart CS. He wielded the veterans like a surgeon wields a scalpel and they played their game phenomenally well.
When it came time for the decider game in the Major final, Hobbit stepped up in a huge way. He went 26-14 over 26 rounds and outfragged every other player on the server. This is another place where young players who can frag can make a huge difference. They can be the sparkplug that a veteran team needs to add a push, win a couple crazy rounds off of their raw aim, and take over the game. Young players tend to roll really well and work off of their momentum in a way that some veterans can’t. A big game from a rookie is likely to be a very, very big game, and that’s what Gambit got out of Hobbit when they needed him most.
Liquid
This current Liquid roster is doing this well, although it may not look like it. Liquid doesn’t have a player over 23 years old, but they still have a heavy veteran presence to help out Twistzz. EliGE, and nitr0 have both been on Liquid for years, and TACO has won two Majors. While all five players are grouped pretty closely in age, especially compared to some of the other rosters I’ve talked about, there is still a pretty obvious support system in place for Twistzz to learn and thrive in.
NRG
This roster is also deceptive. They have great young guys, nahtE, brehze, and CeRq. And they have daps, who is their IGL, has been active since 2012 and is 25 years old. So, you’d think they’d be set. But daps hasn’t actually had a ton of top tier experience. This NRG team is pretty solidly the best team he’s ever been on, and so he is being put into unfamiliar spots, just like the young guys. If a roster change was considered, which I don’t really think it should be, they should look to adding someone who has international LAN experience to help out the young guns.
Mousesports
This team is very ENCE-esque. They have a similar old AWPer, oskar, and a young star, ropz. Oskar, along with ChrisJ, create a solid base for the rest of the team to build on, providing consistency and stability.
What makes this team unique is their construction beyond that. Oskar is their main AWPer, which usually isn’t the role of the oldest player, whereas ropz is a more passive, site holding type of player, like you usually see from a veteran. This combination adds a lot of firepower to this team, that makes them especially scary.
Team composition is not even close to an exact science. It isn’t necessary to have a mix of veterans and rookies by any means, and plenty of teams succeed without following this philosophy. Still, this is something to consider when evaluating teams. Thinking about the player’s roles, in game and out of game, is a great way to get an edge when betting.
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