A good captain or coach who perfectly understands the game and can make the right call in a round is a great rarity. Even the legendary Virtus.Pro was constantly swapping this role between players, and in the end, they couldn't decide who should be captain. In that case, you have to respect coaches like Zonic, Fallen, Zeus, or Andrei B1ad3, who we'll tell you about today. Cyber-sport.io authors highlighted four significant factors that, in our opinion, helped B1ad3 become a great coach.
He joined his first professional team in 2005 (over 17 years ago). He quickly rose to the role of captain and has been consistently making Tier-1 level appearances ever since. For example, in the prestigious WCG tournament, his team took third place and held the TOP-1 team rank in Ukraine for some time.
Scouting, i.e. searching for good young players, is a standard practice in a big sport, and every club pays a lot of attention to it, but in CS it started to develop actively only in recent years, and before that, "scouts", that is people who watched hundreds of young players was very few. On the other hand, Andrei was well aware of this process's importance and constantly kept an eye on weaker teams. He uncovered so much talent that it was an honor for young players to be on his roster. Journalists would write articles listing the players B1ad3 had fostered.
That is where his situation is unique. If we consider his game only in CS:GO, we see that Andrei never stopped watching TIR-3 players. He saw and understood what each of them is doing on the server, what mistakes they made, and how they needed to improve to start performing better. At the same time, Andrei spent 95% of his career in CS: GO at the TIR-2 level. He rarely ever dropped below the top 30 in the rankings of teams HLTV.
That is, not only did he excel in TIR-3 CS because he was actively monitoring it for young and talented players, but he also performed well on his TIR-2 level, which was impossible to do without an understanding of the game. Now add that B1ad3 has played in 9 major tournaments since 2014. That means that in addition to his TIR-2 level play, he regularly faced some of the strongest teams in the world, who played at 100% of their potential. All in all, B1ad3 spent many years in that unique position, where he knew exactly what was going on with CS game plan at any level: from TIR-3 to TIR-1. And, of course, that affected his experience.
Andrei often took newcomers into his teams, who had to be intensively trained for months, and he had to do a lot of individual work with them. Not just to point out mistakes but to build full-fledged development strategies for players, taking into account their style of play and personal understanding of CS. Everyone has a different vision of the game, and it wasn't enough for the coach to take a young player and teach him how to think like him, it just wouldn't work. Each player needs their own separate, individual approach and B1ad3 does a great job with that.
B1ad3 recently became a world champion, but there have been many more exciting moments in his career. Would you like us to talk more about his career? Share your propositions on our Twitter.
