Kazakh cyber athlete Alexey (Qikert) Golubev, along with his team Outsiders, won the IEM Rio Major 2022 world championship in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO) in Brazil, QazMonitor reports citing KazTag.
In the final round of the tournament in Rio de Janeiro, Outsiders, coached by Dastan Akbayev, defeated the Danish team Heroic with a score of 2-0. The team had previously beaten formidable teams like Fnatic and MOUZ, both of which represent the European Union.
CS: GO Major Championships, or simply Majors, is one of the most popular and prestigious tournaments in the Global Offensive community. Sponsored by Valve, the company that provides the game streaming service Steam, this year’s prize pool was a whopping $1.25 million. Along with the championship title, Alexey’s team won $500,000.
Outsiders performs under the Russian flag. Besides the two Kazakh representatives, Golubev and Akbayev, the team has four Russians: Peter (Fame) Boleshev, Jami (Jame) Ali, Evgeny (FL1T) Lebedev, David (n0rb3r7) Danielyan.
Golubev and Akbayev had already reached the Majors’ final three years earlier at StarLadder Berlin Major 2019, as part of the Kazakh team Avangar, losing in the end to Astralis, a team from Denmark.
The duo is not the first Kazakhs to win the Majors. In 2017, the PGL Major Kraków tournament was won by the team Gambit, which consisted of Kazakhstan's Dauren (AdreN) Kystaubayev, Abay (Hobbit) Khasenov, and Rustem (mou) Telepov. They were the first CIS representatives to become CS: GO world champions.