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GamingSenzu Becoming an AWPer Would Be Biggest Mistake of his Career
With the announcement that Azbayar “Senzu” Munkhbold would be looking to move on from The MongolZ, the rifler quickly became one of the hottest transfer prospects in Counter-Strike.
Until he wasn’t.
Following the announcement that he wouldn’t be returning to the team in which he made his name, a report emerged to say that the Mongolian would be interested in becoming a primary AWPer on his new team, a move that would see him return to a role he played much earlier in his career.
A few highlight plays as a secondary AWPer may have everyone excited by this prospect, but make no mistake, signing Senzu as an AWPer would be an incredibly bad decision for whichever team does it.
Some people just shouldn’t AWP
Think of Nikola “NiKo” Kovac. Arguably the greatest rifler in the history of Counter-Strike, even he has believed that he could AWP at times. But it just raises one question: “Why?”
Sure, occasionally cracking out a second AWP is a viable strategy. Its unpredictable nature frequently catches the enemy team off guard, which can result in an easy round win. But it’s a one or two rounds a half kind of thing. Any more than that, and fast strats combined with flashbangs quickly find that second AWP in a situation they’re not used to.
However, due to those few rounds where it works, ego takes over. Those players who get to enjoy the benefits of second AWPing suddenly wonder what it would be like if they did it full-time, but doing it full-time is a different beast. When you always have the AWP in your hands, those utilities and fast plays that hurt you when the second AWP stops working become constant, and every round is therefore punishing.
CS:GO’s AWP dominance tricked everyone. AWPing has always been really hard, and the best AWPers were rated so highly because they were just special players. That’s even more prevalent in CS2, and that’s just the CT side we’re talking about; the T side is even harder.
Just look at the T side rating of most tier one AWPers. Outside of the S-tier snipers, all AWPers suffer on CS’s offensive side. As Martin “STKYO” Styk pointed out in our interview with him, most of the AWPers nowadays are tasked with doing a lot of dirty work on the T side.
Instead of taking gunfights, they’re throwing utility, or being used as the thankless bombsite entry in late-round scenarios. Alex “Mauisnake” Ellenberg thinks that may change as a result of Danil “molodoy” Golubenko, but in an era where aggressive rifling is king, there’s only so much it can change.
Besides, there’s also the fact that by making a superstar caliber rifler AWP, you also lose their proficiency with a rifler. This is bad for two reasons. The first being that you likely end up with a worse rifler as a result, and the second is that the superstar player is now longer putting up superstar numbers with the big green in his hands, so you’ve decreased your firepower twice.
Senzu wasn’t even good at second AWPing
Now to the obligatory stats part of the article. The part where we tell you that, despite that crazy Dust2 round, Senzu wasn’t actually very good with the AWP in his hands.
Crazy, who could have known that a round where he didn’t actually scope for his kills didn’t mean anything?
Highlight aside, as has been pointed out, Senzu was the only semi-regular AWPer to actually make his team less likely to win a round when he had the gun in his hands. That put him even lower than former GamerLegion sniper Jeremy “Kursy” Gast, who struggled so much that he lasted just two months on the team.
It’s not just positioning, either; he’s actually not good at aiming with the gun. Funnily enough, given that no-scope clip, he hits less than a third of his scoped shots when he has an AWP in his hands. That puts him 43rd behind Guilherme “saadzin” Pacheco, but with a greater gap between him and saadzin than there is between saadzin and Fnatic AWPer, Dmytro “jambo” Semera, who is 31st.
Is Signing Senzu a Good Idea?
If you couldn’t tell already, signing Senzu as an AWPer wouldn’t just be a bad idea – it would be a terrible one. But what if signing him at all isn’t a great idea?
International teams are the meta nowadays, but there’s something to be said about culture and communication. While The MongolZ’ players are now far better with English than when they first rose to tier one, they’re still far more limited than a lot of European or even South American talents.
There are certainly teams he could improve, Liquid, G2, NAVI, and MOUZ all come to mind as potential landing spots for him, but it’s obvious that two of those wouldn’t work as intended.
NAVI became the team of 2024 without a superstar, instead doing so via the power of friendship. Okay, that might be hyperbole, they’re all pretty good players, but it was still clear that it was the atmosphere within the camp that drove them to their success. MOUZ is a similar story, with the team holding a core of players who graduated from MOUZ NXT ever since Dorian “xertioN” Berman was promoted to the main roster in August 2022.
That type of connection might not be possible with an Asian player thrown into an EU team; the cultures might be too different. The only real evidence we have for it is Hansel “BnTeT” Ferdinand’s time on Gen.G, and while the Indonesian didn’t struggle there, he wasn’t the same player he was on TYLOO, and he never really recovered after leaving.
In all likelihood, it’s a question that probably won’t be answered for a couple of months at least. The announcement of Senzu’s availability, much like with Martin “stavn” Lund, came too late for the star to get a new team in the recent rostermania. We just have to hope that when a move does come to fruition, it ultimately works out.
Otherwise, Counter-Strike will lose one of its great riflers far too soon.
