s1mple’s path: from toxic teenager to the world champion

School and Childhood

At school, Sasha was an uncontrollable kid who constantly fought with someone and interfered with his classmates. His mother recalls that she always had to talk with the parents of Sasha's classmates about her son's behavior.
 

On the other hand, s1mple showed perseverance and desire to achieve his goals despite everything at that age. Every day he woke up at 7 am, an hour later he was already at school, and at 4 pm he went to the computer club, where he spent the time until late at night. And he combined this tight schedule with excellent studies at school because his father, a military man by profession, had a strict rule: “you study poorly - no games”.

Courage Gaming

A couple of years later, when Sasha had already grown up and played CS at the pro level and the influence of his parents had diminished, frankly speaking, the guy went off the rails. For example, playing for Courage Gaming under the guidance of b1ad3, s1mple also liked to stream a lot. But he was engaged there not only in playing cs, but also in advertising gambling sites, which he often bred on the money, and also took expensive knives “for several games” from his subscribers and did not ever return them. And if he played cs on the stream, he behaved there as toxically as possible, insulting his teammates even for minor mistakes. In general, at that time his behavior was very ambiguous, in his spare time, he was engaged in a common divorce for the money of his viewers and advertisers.

Hellraisers

In the autumn of 2014, Sasha was invited to Tier-2 team called HellRaisers. Another chance to start over and get your way. After several months of training, the team advances to the major "DreamHack 2014". For a team like them, this was already a great result. But they went further, took first place in their group, and managed to get into the Top-8. It seemed that things were going great for them: 5th-8th place in the major, Sasha took 13th place in the list of the best players of the tournament when his closest teammate rank was only 33rd.

What can go wrong

After the Major, Alexander is kicked out of the team. The official reason: is the old ban from ESL. But a lot of rumors say it's connected not only with that. On his streams, the player continued to behave toxically and once publicly wished the inhabitants of one European country to go to hell. In his last major match, which they lost, s1mple, according to rumors, said something to his teammates that they could no longer tolerate.

Then there was the usual running around different teams, Sasha also tried to create his team, but he didn’t like the roles that he was assigned to, and he was returning to the old Flipsid3 and Hellraisers as a substitute, but he couldn’t play there and just made me lineups every month. Something had to change, and it did.