When one thinks of countries boasting the best talent in Counter-Strike, thoughts normally turn to a few places. The Scandinavian countries are obvious choices: Denmark usually has multiple teams in the top 10; or Sweden, whose teams dominated the early days. Outside Scandinavia Poland has a thriving scene, producing the once-dominant Virtus.Pro line-up known as the Virtus Plow. Then you might look at teams from Russia and Ukraine, who dominate the CIS Region, with Natus Vincere holding strong winning streaks; if one were to go across the Atlantic, the USA and Brazil have both won majors with the best their talent pool has to offer. But before recently, nobody would have really expected a country which is emerging as a hotbed of rising talent: Israel.
Israel does not have an extensive history with the game. Whereas most of the above organisations can trace their history all the way back to the early 2000s and Counter-Strike’s beginnings, it is only in recent years (and a few years after the release of Global Offensive, the latest game in the series) that Israeli teams have begun to make an impact on the scene. While there have been smaller, local tournaments involving Israeli teams, it is only in 2018 that I can find the first instances of Israeli teams competing on the global stage: specifically, teams like Aequus, exDT and Team Finest competing in the Asia region. The best achievement they managed was when the exDT line-up of Hydra, ZENCER, anarkez, Meow, and shushan reached the Katowice Asia Minor in 2019. (Remember those names for later).
A turning point appears to have been a controversial incident in March this year in the qualifier for the ESL One Rio Asia Minor. Aequus, having added youngsters FlameZ, Spinx and ponkt to join ZENCER and shushan, were in the final round of the qualifier against Camel Riders, a team from UAE, when ESL’s choice of a Dubai server for the third map caused the Israeli players to suffer from ping spikes around 200ms. Aequus forfeited Overpass in protest. The team has not played an official fixture since.
Israel, as a country, suffers something of a geographical quandary; it is located at the centre of a rough triangle between Central Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, but it is not really considered a part of any of them. Israeli teams usually compete in European competitions in other sports, but in CSGO terms, it has always been part of the Middle East scene. The Middle Eastern scene is not the best developed, as the money from organisers tends to focus on Europe and the Americas; this makes it difficult for teams, even those with global ambitions, to find quality opposition to practice against, and therefore to improve. This was before the global pandemic made things even more difficult, by removing even the opportunity of periodic LAN competition against the top teams.
The players who made up Israel’s elite took a different approach. If they couldn’t progress as a team due to factors beyond their control, they would instead focus on becoming great individual players. Enter FPL.
FPL stands for FaceIT Pro League. Since its founding in 2017, FPL has operated as a kind of private group of servers for professional players. Players queue up for matches, are assigned into teams, and attain MMR (match-making rank) points based on their results. The top players in points at the end of each month are awarded cash prizes, while the players at the bottom are removed from the player pool and replaced by players from the FPL-Challenger league. (FPL-Challenger is, in turn, fed by a series of circuit leagues in different countries such as the UK, Germany, and Denmark). These incentives create a tough — but rewarding — environment — for players to practice and improve in. And, while aimed at existing professional players looking for a way to keep their skills sharp, the past year has seen a number of players who have taken the opposite approach: they have joined FPL via the challenger leagues, put the hours in to improve, and used the talent they show on the FPL servers to earn a move to top teams. The first and most obvious case of this was when Faze Clan picked 16-year-old Lithuanian Bymas to replace their star player olofmeister while the latter was on an extended break. But three Israeli talents, who you may recognise from earlier, have ridden the same path: anarkez, FlameZ, and Spinx.
It is not difficult to see why teams are keen on these players. FPL is possibly the purest way to grind out the fundamental mechanics of Counter-Strike. The professional players who populate its servers are ruthless in punishing mistakes; therefore, if a player is able to find success on FPL, teams can be assured that their ability to get kills (“frag”) and to communicate information effectively must be among the best in the world — mechanics which teams can then build on through offering them coaching and slotting them into their strategies. While Bymas’ performance at FaZe was considered underwhelming, partly due to the roles he found himself playing not playing to his strengths, he has found greater success at Mousesports, where he can focus on fragging.
AWPer Anarkez was the first player to make the jump to playing internationally. He joined Team Secret in November 2019, in a line-up primarily consisting of FPL players: Albanians juanflatroo and sinopssy, Swiss youngster RigoN and himself alongside Polish player TudsoN. He duly went on to win the monthly FPL prize in January of 2020, and while Secret have been through a few line-up changes over the course of 2020, since they hit a stable line-up and qualified for ESEA Premier Division in the summer, anarkez has gone from strength to strength. He boasts a 1.16 rating in matches played during the last 3 months, a run that has taken Secret into the top 40 teams in the world. This included finishing 4th in the league, with anarkez himself the 4th highest-rated player in the league across 17 matches played against some of Europe’s best second-tier teams.
Spinx came next. In the summer, following success in mix teams such as the Israeli-Swedish Tikitakan as well as his exploits in FPL (winning for August), he was invited for a trial at c0ntact Gaming, alongside ex-BIG Clan AWPer and fellow FPL grinder smooya. C0ntact are new to CS, only joining in January, but they have lofty ambitions, and competed in the Flashpoint competition while flirting with a top 30 world ranking. While smooya has now left c0ntact due to a clash of roles, Spinx has stuck it out, and their new young line-up (featuring RigoN) has just managed to qualify for Dreamhack Masters Winter, while also being tipped to do well in the second season of Flashpoint. Spinx is only 17, and he arguably has yet to show his full potential — which will have c0ntact fans excited for his future.
Despite possibly being the most talented player of the three, flameZ had to wait a bit longer for his turn. The younger brother of shushan, the two competed together over the summer in Adaptation and Tikitakan, both of which were mix teams consisting primarily of Israeli players, before flameZ went solo to fill in for European sides Elites and Singularity, hoping for an opportunity to come along. He found the perfect chance when UK organisation Endpoint needed an entry fragger to replace outgoing star Thomas. It may have seemed like a large jump, but since joining them in August, he has produced a performance that belies his young age (he is still only 17). His average rating of 1.15 is a key factor to Endpoint qualifying for tournaments such as Dreamhack Open Fall and entering HLTV’s top 30 rankings for the first time — going from stand-in to star player and producing highlight reel-worthy plays to fans’ delight.
The geographical quandary that I mentioned above seems to have been solved as Israeli players have realised that they need not be limited to the Asian scene. General improvements in internet infrastructure mean that ping is less of an issue; yes, the players compete on higher ping than their European counterparts, but nowhere near the 200ms spikes the Aequus players experienced against Camel Riders. Also helping is that Israel standard time is GMT+2, meaning players can play on the same schedule as European players. That, in turn, gives them the opportunity to play against the best in the world, both in FPL and in competition, and to improve as players in the way that they were unable to do whilst limited to the Asian scene.
Coronavirus may, inadvertently, have also helped Israeli players “break the bubble”. The transition to primarily online tournaments, removing LANs from the picture, has also removed many of the physical and logistical barriers to playing top-tier CS. Teams like Endpoint, who would previously be restricted to looking at players within or close to the UK, can afford to consider the likes of flameZ and Spinx when they are not expecting to hold a “bootcamp” — an in-person training camp — until a while into 2021, let alone attend another LAN tournament. Thus, with training and competition alike all taking place online, opportunities open up which might not have otherwise been available.
Another reason that Israeli players have been able to find success is that FPL requires English communication, to serve as a common language for its players. While Hebrew is the native language of Israel, with only 2% of Israelis speaking English as a native language, it is nevertheless common in the country. Many road signs are displayed in both Hebrew and English, and English proficiency is a core requirement to graduate high school. This helps Israeli players in that they are not limited to an Israeli core, and the teams that have found the most success in Europe have been those that communicate in English, and the international line-ups bring a different perspective to the game from the different scenes they have played in.
Tikitakan is a good example of this. It started out as the roster formerly representing Turkish organisation 9INE, but essentially became a flag of convenience for a group of FPL players, going through a number of rosters over the summer. Its most successful period came with flameZ and Spinx in the team, and they embarrassed a number of established organisations such as Winstrike, Alternate ATTAX, Syman and Hard Legion during runs in Malta Vibes 5, Nine to Five 2 and the ESEA Advanced play-offs. The sheer talent of Spinx and flameZ (with shushan joining for some matches as well) allowed them to overcome even more well-drilled teams, but it would not have been possible were it not for their English-speaking comms and willingness to play with other talent, such as Swedes aybeN and Djur, or fellow FPL player REDS7AR.
The success of these players on international rosters inevitably has some fans drooling at the prospect of an Israeli superteam in the future. Pairing up flameZ with anarkez again, after how they have developed this year, combined with a good IGL and Spinx rifling — it’s not hard to see why the prospect is so tantalising. And with such young players, there’s still plenty of time for it to happen. That said, it should also be treated with caution. One of the reasons these players have found success is in being open to players and ideas from outside the Israeli scene. (And it’s worth noting that this works both ways; Endpoint and c0ntact both went international with their line-ups and are being rewarded for it). We won’t see a reformed Aequus or exDT any time soon, I don’t think, but there’s reason to be excited.
For one thing, players who perform consistently well naturally start to turn heads. Counter-Strike is a notoriously fickle sport; the financially precarious nature of many teams and the emotion running high after a brutal defeat means rosters frequently get chopped and changed. Could we see an Israeli player on a tier 1 team soon? We know that the big orgs are willing to put their money where their mouth is, and that they’re not afraid of taking a risk on young talent either. It’s entirely possible that the next stage of one of these players’ journey could take them to one of Europe’s many international line-ups.
The other exciting thing is each player that proves it is possible will inspire another player to take up the challenge. When Israeli participation on the professional stage was limited to the same handful of orgs, going to the same handful of competitions to get beaten by teams with more resources, the dedication to the grind necessary to rise up would be lacking. But now that we’ve seen players not just reach FPL, not only join EU teams, but show consistent talent and success, that should drive the whole scene to improve in response. The next anarkez could well be playing the game right now, the next flameZ might be about to join his first team, maybe the next Spinx is grinding his way through FPL-C as you’re reading this. The road to the top will be long, involving many hours to make tiny improvements. But the fact that there is a road now is enough. A year that began with Israel’s top team denied a shot at the minor, frustrated by circumstances they could do nothing about, will end with three young players competing at the top and an Israeli core team (Adaptation) close to the play-offs in ESEA Advanced. Israeli fans, who have previously had little to cheer about, will no doubt hope the future continues in the vein of this pivotal year for their scene.
