At the StarLadder Budapest Major, we had the chance to sit down and talk with Alex “Mauisnake” Ellenberg, getting his hottest takes on the CS2 meta and where some teams have gone wrong throughout the year – including a scathing review of Danny “zonic” Sorensen’s performance as Team Falcons head coach.

2025 was a great year for Counter-Strike. From the sheer dominance of Vitality to the resurgence of Brazilian CS and FURIA thanks to the importing of Mareks “YEKINDAR” Galinskis and Danil “molodoy” Golubenko, it all came to an incredible close as Vitality beat their critics and became the first team to win back-to-back CS2 Majors in Budapest. 

The always outspoken analyst was scathing in his assessment of Danny “zonic” Sorensen and Falcons, but was far nicer about FURIA, waxing lyrical about how they can still declare themselves as the world’s best team even without a Major title to their name.

Mauisnake’s Hot Takes

Has this been one of the best years of Counter-Strike ever?

That’s tough because there’s been a lot of great years, but with Vitality having their era and the ever-looming threat of them continuing to extend that, there’s still a lot of storylines.

I feel like the race for number one is still really hotly contested between donk and ZywOo, so now we’re at the point where you have to display your criteria in order to find the answer. Do you value team achievements or individual performance? If so, you would obviously rank one over the other.

The level between the top 6-8 teams in the world is so good that there’s always something exciting to watch between them. And I don’t think the underdogs are that bad, a lot of the teams in 9th-15th are always big threats.

Do you think criticisms of Vitality in the second half of the year are justified, or is it suffering from the success of the first season?

It’s warranted. They weren’t playing as well as they were, they didn’t look as dialed in or connected. Whether that’s the pack of players to ropz, or like in the BLAST Open London final, when ZywOo and flameZ were missing key pieces of utility, so they could have easily won another trophy this season, because both came at match point. 

The way I’ve always framed it is that they’re only 5-10% weaker, but that the other teams have raised their level. The gap was already so slim that they were barely winning some of their championships anyway. Look at how close IEM Melbourne was.

It’s not that they were way weaker, but even ZywOo said that they’re at 60% when in the first half of the year they were at 95%. It’s not that much of a chasm though, for sure.

Regardless of what happened at the Major, do FURIA have stopping power as a number one team?

I feel like it’s just denial to say that they don’t. They’ve beaten Vitality, Falcons, Spirit, practically everybody. They’ve shown they can beat them all and have an extensive map pool. A top five, if not three, AWPer in molodoy, a top five rifler in KSCERATO, and it’s also really foolish for people to underrate FalleN as a captain and a leader. He’s clearly one of the best at setting the tone and getting everyone to listen so that in the middle of the round so they can stop on a dime and execute a secondary plan.

molodoy gets more kills with an AWP than most other top level AWPers, do you think the focus FURIA puts on him could see a meta shift where the AWP gets more focus again?

People have to keep up with what molodoy is doing. He’s a trailblazer in terms of what you can do with the gun, and when you look at the three best AWPers we’ve had recently in sh1ro, m0NESY, and ZywOo, two of them I would consider to be on the more passive side.

molodoy pushes it to another level. A few AWPers have tried it, r1nkle was good for a stretch of three months, but then got figured out and tumbled back down. molodoy has now kept it up for seven months of being really aggressive, using the weapon a lot, so if other people don’t have an aggressive AWPer like molodoy, they don’t have the wealth of options that FURIA have.

In terms of Spirit, given that they have donk and sh1ro, it feels like they should be the dominant team everyone is looking to beat. What do you think stops them from becoming that?

Chopper and hally have a very unique, but actually quite enviable problem where they have the best opener in the world. That means they want to use him and set him up, but because they do that, they’ve ended up relying on him too much.

So much of their form depends on whether donk performs at an otherworldly level. They don’t even need too many fallbacks, but they’re also not really the most well-rounded team. When they run what is a more standard round, getting more map control through a default with a finishing execute, then it feels like you’re stifling donk, so sending him to an obvious death in a round when Spirit also doesn’t have the most precise flashes might not be optimal.

They also seem to bet on young talent too often, and they keep going through young talent. They got rid of magixx, and he was only 22 or 23. Instead, they brought in an 18-year-old, and it feels like they don’t let it sink in that they have a sustainably strong roster. It’s like they keep trying to go deeper and further future-proof, but in my eyes, you already have that if you have a support player like Magixx who can overperform in big games. There’s no reason to search further into the tier two weeds and pluck something out. 

As much as it’s a joke at this point, does it feel like Falcons need their “one more star” even if it’s due to roles and not firepower?

zonic has now had the opportunity to use s1mple, NiKo, m0NESY, kyousuke, and he has a single trophy of debatable quality to his name in the PGL tournament from earlier this year with a weak field. 

If I’m to point the finger at this point, it has to be at him. They’ve added so much firepower, and of course, they could add more, but I was pretty taken aback by his post-game interview and all of the excuses. They’ve had plenty of time to practice, but it’s always things like that when it goes wrong, and it’s because they’re running star, sword, and shield exercises at PC-less bootcamps. 

The methods don’t work anymore. They just simply don’t. Other coaches have shown that they’re getting more out of less, and maybe they don’t have the sustained success, but they don’t have remotely close to the player quality zonic has. 

At this point, one more superstar isn’t enough for me. It’s been two years. You can’t just keep changing players ad infinitum. This was the Major to at least get to the semi-finals, and they didn’t do it. 

Liquid has still failed to regain its position at the top. What’s going wrong with them in your eyes?

It just felt like they didn’t really iron out enough of their protocols in time for this Major. Watching them more closely at CAC, it felt like they were relying so heavily on individuals to carry them in late rounds, even if they had a structured opening. 

Even watching them here [in Budapest], they’re just calling off of feeling too much. I don’t think they’ve outlined the system they have. Obviously, swapping EliGE and Twistzz halfway through the season isn’t easy because they’re such different players, and they also have Flashie in his first tier one head coach gig, so if I’m going to be real, it’s hard to point the finger.

The ownership of the faults that have hit Liquid may even be due to Twistzz, actually. He wanted ultimate and skullz, and they’ve both proven to be less than ideal for an organisation of Liquid’s calibre.