An in-game leader’s impact is one of Counter-Strike’s big intangibles, with the common viewer only getting a glimpse into teams’ communication, calls, and internal struggles. Still, we can tell from the outside that there is no one correct way to be an in-game-leader, resulting in a number of different, yet still effective, leadership styles.

We have had full support IGLs, throwing most of a team’s grenades from the back lines to aid their star players. Hard entry IGLs went far as jumping round corners to ensure their star player (think Mathias “⁠MSL⁠” Lauridsen and Kristian “⁠k0nfig⁠” Wienecke) behind them could get the trade. Some even take up star roles themselves, from hard lurkers like Vincent “⁠Happy⁠” Schopenhauer, star AWPers like Gabriel “⁠FalleN⁠” Toledo, and impact machines like when Nikola “⁠NiKo⁠” Kovač captained MOUZ.

The trendy, modern, style of in-game-leading, though, is none of these. This type of caller will still be aggressive, but it is for a different purpose: information.

The regular measures of a player’s performance — Rating, Impact, and the like — obviously have zero bearing on the quality of a player’s actual leadership and only give us a glimpse into what type of IGL they are. However, not all metrics have to be used to measure performance; we can also measure style.

Take a player’s AWP KPR, which tends to be a more stylistic measure since it does not take into account how often a player had an AWP. Players like Florian “⁠syrsoN⁠” Rische, Ilya “⁠m0NESY⁠” Osipov, and Dzhami “⁠Jame⁠” Ali top this leaderboard in 2022 since they prioritise having the big green more often than Aleksandr “⁠s1mple⁠” Kostyliev or Helvijs “⁠broky⁠” Saukants.

By using stats like this, to measure style and not performance, we should be able to find the IGLs who are part of this new school of ‘information-gatherers’.

What even is an ‘information-gatherer’?

I’ll let Mareks “⁠YEKINDAR⁠” Gaļinskis explain, with his answer on the live edition of HLTV Confirmed: “Information gathering on T-side is so different [with an aggressive captain] because they can make plays based on their mind games […] and nobody’s going to say no.” He continued, “the bad thing [about having your AWPer as captain is that] they don’t see as much of the full picture as players who are in the center of the action.”

In other words, these are in-game leaders who are active in their side’s defaults gain access to information with their own eyes that doesn’t need to be filtered through communication. No matter how good a team’s communication is, being in the action will always be beneficial to an IGL that has studied his opponent’s rotations, and can ‘feel’ their opponent responding to what they are doing, rather than what their team are doing.

When an entry fragger like Pavle “⁠Maden⁠” Bošković or YEKINDAR want to make a mid-round call or play off an instinct or a read, they’ll often need to ask permission. For Vladislav “⁠nafany⁠” Gorshkov, Finn “⁠karrigan⁠” Andersen, or Dan “⁠apEX⁠” Madesclaire they can make the play instantly, giving them a far greater chance at pulling it off.

IGLs’ trading and opening kills attempts

The advantages are obvious, and are born out in the stats: Rifling IGLs, with a mean (and median) opening kill attempts on T-side of 26%, were far more aggressive at the PGL Major Antwerp than regular riflers (19%). At a glance, we can see how much this meta of aggressive IGLing has been taken up.

That does not mean, though, that there is only one way to lead a team. Within the bracket of ‘aggressive’ and ‘info-gathering’ IGLs, there are a myriad of styles. Andrei “⁠arT⁠” Piovezan and nafany are extreme outliers, each taking more than 40% (an equal spread of duels between players would be 20%) of their side’s opening duels on the attacking side. karrigan and Kirill “⁠Boombl4⁠” Mikhailov are more measured, hovering around (the still very aggressive) 30%.

This stat only measures a player’s involvement in opening duels, so is not a flawless proxy for measuring aggression in the way I am describing. A player like NiKo is a good example, taking up 26.6% of G2‘s opening duels on T-side but you still wouldn’t call him an entry fragger. Rather, he is an aggressive opener, making plays like walking through the outside smokes on Nuke rather than suiciding out hut aiming to take space rather than heads.

That’s why the Y-axis here is the percentage of a player’s deaths that are traded. Though still imperfect, a player with high marks in both opening kill attempts and deaths traded percentages are more likely to be in a team’s entry pack, rather than making solo aggressive lurks. This is why karrigan and Boombl4 are in the top right of the chart, while a lurker like Richard “⁠shox⁠” Papillon has the worst deaths traded percentage.

Introducing the Style Chart

This chart shows us a grouping of IGLs who score well in both categories but it is still only scratching the surface of the context we can gather from stats. That’s where these fairly complicated pizza wheels, inspired by The Athletic, come in. They are a great way to measure a player’s performance in many metrics at once, and are easier to gather information from at a glance than a table.

The values on these pizza charts are percentiles; the ‘fuller’ the slice, the higher the player ranks in that category against all players at the Major. These are not measured with base stats or plotted on a linear scale; the minimum score in each category is given a ‘rank’ of 0, and each result is sorted in order to give a mark from 0 (the min) to 1 (the max). It’s the same method used to calculate the median (which is 0.5, or half a full pizza slice, here).

As for our metrics, a list is easier, going round clockwise:

– OPK ATT, Opening Kill Attempts on T-side: a player’s first kills added to their first deaths.
– DTHS TRD%: Percentage of a player’s deaths that were traded on T-side.
–CLT PR: clutch ‘points’ per round (1 point for a 1v1, 2 for a 1v2, 3 for 1v3 etc.)
– 1ON1 W%: 1on1 wins divided by 1on1 losses.
– SRV IN LOSS: A player’s survival rate in lost rounds.
– TIME ALIVE PR: The average ‘lifetime’ of a player.
– TRD. INV: A player’s involvement in trades, or trade kills + trade deaths.
– TRD. KPR: Trade kills per round.
– AWP%: Percentage of kills made with the AWP. Because of the way percentiles work (only 15% or so of players are primary AWPers) hybrid players will score very highly in this category, so be careful.
– UTIL DMG: Average utility damage per round.
– FAPR: Flash assists per round.

Access the chart in full screen here.

The ‘red’ category contains the same information as the first scatterplot: nafany aggressively searches for information without support, while karrigan is slightly less aggressive but ensures a player is nearby to trade more often. For nafany and arT, information is deemed important enough that they left their team in a 4v5 on T-side in more than 30% of rounds at the Major.

arT, unlike nafany, manages to post high (relative to the whole sample) stats in deaths traded percentage, utility damage, and flash assists despite spending most of the round dead. This may be due to Cloud9‘s teamplay being off at the Major — they won just 18.3% of their 4v5s on T-side, which was the lowest of all teams — but karrigan and arT show a more rounded image of what the ‘information-gatherer’ IGL pizza chart should look like.

Another intangible advantage of this aggression is the confidence trades give your star players, something mentioned by MSL when he spoke to Rush B Media in January: “When you get one easy [trade] kill per round, it’s a lot easier to feel confident and get even more kills,” something that might explain why Philip “⁠aizy⁠” Aistrup and then Markus “⁠Kjaerbye⁠” Kjærbye and then k0nfig were all so good under MSL.

What is impressive is that karrigan and arT manage to do this whilst still having respectable utility stats. But is this true for everyone?

Do aggressive IGLs do less support work?

From this chart, we can see that IGLs still do a huge amount of support work, despite their aggression — they outperform regular riflers by far in both. karrigan and Boombl4 are again in the top right of the scatterplot, with arT and nafany in the bottom right once more.

This implies that arT‘s flash assists are a product of quality over quantity, but we should not be surprised that an IGL has exceptional utility usage. There are not many players better at throwing inch-perfect flashbangs than the IGLs who, more often than not, found them in practice servers. So, it makes sense to have them go from aggressive space-finders to pure support players in the late round.

This concept is similar to the approach on CT-side, when the previously aggressive entry IGLs are sent to anchor spots like B on Mirage. Some IGLs have been info-gatherers on CT too, such as Lukas “⁠gla1ve⁠” Rossander before the addition of Benjamin “⁠blameF⁠” Bremer or Aleksi “⁠Aleksib⁠” Virolainen on OG, which offers similar advantages at the cost of a little bit of fragging.

Yet, both IGLs have handed these spots over to their star rifles in new lineups and still maintained strong CT-sides — it is T-side that G2 are struggling, whilst ex-IGL blameF is one of the best CT-sided players in the world which puts a bit of a facade over Astralis’ many role clashes.

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What about the AWPing IGLs?

Another point of interest on this chart regards AWPing IGLs, who are consistently throwing the best flashes. All modern AWPers have to be support players; what makes the likes of Casper “⁠cadiaN⁠” Møller and Jame special is that they compress three roles into one player (AWPer, caller, support). cadiaN stands out for his aggression: 23.9% attempts on T-side is up there with most aggressive riflers, let alone AWPers. Even with the AWP, he wants to place himself in the centre of the action.

This ‘role compression’, a Pokémon concept first used in CS by Elliott “aizyesque” Griffiths, was best put to use by FalleN‘s LG/SK lineup, letting them have four star players: the aggressive openers of Fernando “⁠fer⁠” Alvarenga, stable lurking of Marcelo “⁠coldzera⁠” David, and the anchor play of Ricardo “⁠boltz⁠” Prass or Lincoln “⁠fnx⁠” Lau. fnx and boltz had similar roles to Emil “⁠Magisk⁠” Reif in peak Astralis but as their team’s 4th best player, not 3rd.

Players like arT and gla1ve dabbled with being primary AWPers in 2021 whilst remaining their team’s primary info-gatherer, but to mixed results: Both sides added an AWPer in 2022 to end those experiments. More recently, NIP have shown that building your team around a strong rifle duo (in Ludvig “⁠Brollan⁠” Brolin and Fredrik “⁠REZ⁠” Sterner) with a more supportive AWPer is still viable, if not tournament winning.

Meta, of course, is cyclical — and there are disadvantages to having your IGL in the pack, too. YEKINDAR commented on the “unnecessary deaths” that are inevitable with an aggressive captain, and this was definitely true of nafany and Cloud9 at the Major. Given that IGLs are generally weaker fraggers than regular players, having your IGL in a place that takes lots of 50-50 duels is hardly optimal.

This was why having your AWPer in-game lead was so appetising; far less mechanical skill is required to get 1.0+ ratings as a turret AWPer than as an entry fragger. Yet, in an era where AWPers like s1mple and broky can pick off your star riflers like it’s nothing, teams are searching for their own star AWPers to do the same, which leaves your IGL back on the rifle.

And if they are on the rifle, they might as well be aggressive, offering up either trade opportunities or the chance to take space based on their reads instantly without any lag due to communication. We very well might see a meta shift soon but, for now, the information gathering IGL reigns supreme.