At the end of the week Sergey “Ax1Le” Rykhtorov received the MVP title at IEM Dallas in Texas. This is the first award of this kind for the player received at a LAN tournament. Before that, he became MVP twice, but only at online events such as ESL Pro League and IEM Summer. Ax1Le delivered one of the best performances of his career and led Cloud9 to their first win at a major event.
The eSports player not only posted an average rating of 1.32, but also showed impressive consistency in all the matches his team played. On each of the sixteen maps his team played in Dallas, Ax1Le's rating was greater than one, and on thirteen of them – more than 1.15.
Ax1Le’s closest rival in the fight for the MVP title was another Cloud9 player Dmitry “sh1ro” Sokolov, who eventually took second place in the list of best players. As a result, Ax1Le outperformed his competitors in almost all respects: he dealt the most damage per round, and also took second place in the number of enemies killed per round.
Particularly noteworthy is the match between Cloud9 and FaZe, in which the Russian team managed to defeat the strongest team in the world. Ax1Le was the player who gave Cloud9 the advantage on the two maps they won to advance to the semi-finals. This was followed by equally successful matches against BIG and ENCE.
