ZywOo was deservedly named IEM Rio‘s MVP after helping Vitality win the $250,000 tournament on April 23. Even though the French AWPer was a dominant player throughout the tournament, he was beaten by legendary CS:GO pro turned Heroic head coach Richard “Xizt” Landström in three different statistics—KAST, support rounds, and deaths per round.
KAST, which stands for Kills, Assists, Survived, and Traded, is a metric that calculates how much a player has contributed per round based on the number of rounds that player had. Xizt had the highest KAST of IEM Rio—78.4 percent—leaving Magisk (77.9 percent), dupreeh (76.4 percent), and ZywOo (76.4 percent) behind, according to HLTV.
The retired pro also had the most support rounds—43.1 percent—and nobody was even close to beating him in that regard. He averaged 0.47 deaths per round, according to HLTV. ZywOo had the second-lowest death per round as well after he averaged 0.54 throughout the tournament.
Xizt had to step in for Heroic and play a professional match for the first time in over two years in the series versus The Mongolz on April 18 because the team’s star rifler Jakob “Jabbi” Nygaard was feeling unwell. The Swede joined the server on the 10th round of Overpass, the second map of the series, and played on the decider Mirage as well, amassing a 28-24 K/D and helping Heroic eliminate The Mongolz.
Jabbi recovered that same day and went back to the starting lineup for the rest of the tournament, which is why Xizt’s numbers stood out at IEM Rio. The coach had a good showing in the only series he played, while players like ZywOo and cadiaN played 15 and 16 maps, respectively.
IEM Rio was the last tier-one tournament ahead of the BLAST Paris Major in May, which will be the last-Valve sponsored tournament in CS:GO. The developer is set to release Counter-Strike 2 worldwide this summer and will host its first Major in 2024
