m0nesy: young and talented
What's inside
Young years
At age 12, he began playing on Faceit and reached level 10 for 150 matches. Later, on the same computer, he reached 3000 ELO on Faceit. The sportsman's first rank was Master-Guardian 2, and eight months later, Ilya reached Global Elite. Ilya found his first team thanks to the streaming platform Twitch, he watched live broadcasts of a player and met him through chat, and later received an invitation from him to join a new team called "NewBALLS". That's how the young talent at 14 y.o. got to HLTV and even showed decent results against stable CIS teams.
The cyber athlete showed a stunning game level for 14 years old teen. The team trained at a bootcamp in Moscow and played online and at local LAN tournaments. Still, there were some disadvantages: due to the player's age, many restrictions were imposed on the team; the simplest example is the inability to participate in qualifying games for championships from Dreamhack.
First significant results
In November 2019, m0nesy left "NewBALLS" and began actively broadcasting live on Twitch. By then, his live streams were consistently gaining a few thousand viewers each, he was actively communicating with his audience, and everyone was excited to watch the 14-year-old easily beat strong opponents on Faceit.
In 2019, the Navi organization, putting a lot of emphasis on young players and building its academic roster, couldn't get past this kid. They weren't embarrassed by Ilya's age and were willing to wait 1.5 years until he could play in all tournaments. But after playing only one game for Navi Junior, he gets the news that the organization is forming a third lineup with even younger players and moving him there.
In October 2019, Ilya started playing for the second Navi team (Navi Junior) and showed excellent results. With Navi Youth, he never even made it to HLTV but continued to develop as a single player. The biggest highlight of that time was an invitation to the FPL (Faceit Pro League). For example, he became the best WEPlay Academy League 1st season player. And after the tournament, the organizers released an analysis where they estimated the transfer value of Ilya Osipov at $336,000.
Golden era
At the end of 2021, the Internet was spreading rumors about m0nesy's move to G2. At first, it looked like the deal was about to happen. However, there was no official announcement, but rumors continued to circulate. Even Ilya himself posted cryptic messages on Instagram. But when the G2 player huNter said they were not going to change the roster, a large part of the community already began to doubt whether the transfer would happen.
But it was confirmed soon: on January 8, NaVi put Ilya and two other players on the “sale”, saying that the first cycle of the talent selection was over and it was time to get the "new blood". After that, the insider neL published an article with all the details of Ilya's move to G2 where he said that in addition to m0nesy, the team also considered AleksiB, but without receiving a response of interest switched to m0nesy.
The first tournament that awaited Ilya two weeks after the transfer was the IEM Katowice 2022 top tournament with a prize fund of almost one million dollars. Everybody was curious how the young talent would present itself in the new team. On the 3rd of January, G2 finally made an official announcement and judging by the video, the m0nesy was in a fighting mood. G2 passed the group stage confidently, m0nesy showed himself quite well, and on the first LAN tournament map, he did something unbelievable, 45 frags in one map against Virtus.Pro.
In the end, G2 finished 2nd place in the tournament, beating Navi in the semi-finals. After that game, Thorin admired Ilya's play and called him "The next one s1mple". That's probably the best compliment you can pay to an eSports player. Now Ilya continues to play for G2, his rating is 1.13, and the team is around the top 5 in the HLTV rankings. If he continues to play at this level, he has a good chance of making it into the top 10 of this year's players.
