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Gamingzweih’s PARIVISION Debut Proves hally is the Problem With Team Spirit
Despite entering the event ranked 16th in the world in Counter-Strike 2, PARIVISION were crowned champions of BLAST Bounty Season 1, and in doing so, may have inadvertently proved that Sergey “hally” Shavaev is the problem with Team Spirit.
A debut event for PARIVISION with Ivan “zweih” Gogin, the former Spirit man shone during the online phase, ending it as the second-highest rated player on 1.61. They then headed into a playoff bracket that would pit them against some of the best teams in the world: Falcons, FURIA, and Spirit.
Spirit, who were also debuting a new look squad for the event, faced struggles outside of their upset defeat at the hands of PARIVISION, and those struggles point towards problems that zweih was wrongfully blamed for during his time on the team.
Misprofiling Stars
It’s important to say that zweih’s move to Spirit perhaps came too soon. Although he had been a star for Nemiga for a while and enjoyed a breakout performance at the BLAST Austin Major, Nemiga were very much a tier two team, and taking the instantaneous leap to the elite level of tier one might have been a step too far.
This is evidenced by zweih’s CT side performances during his stint with Spirit, where, despite keeping most of his preferred roles from his time on Nemiga, zweih struggled and recorded a 1.00 rating, a huge decrease from his 1.13 rating on Nemiga.
T sides were a greater concern, though, with zweih slipping to 0.92 from 1.15. However, it was on the T side where zweih actually experienced role changes. During his time on Nemiga, the young Russian was a lurker tasked with actually being disruptive in late rounds, finding openings against weakened teams or punishing rotating players in post plants.
When he moved to Spirit, that all changed. While still lurking, zweih was no longer afforded the opportunity to capitalise on these timings, and instead was tasked with becoming the entry for bombsite executes.
This is a suffocating role, often requiring specialists to take it on. Vitality took Shahar “flameZ” Shushan and turned him into the greatest entry in modern CS, but in Spirit, where donk’s rifle ability is the only thing focused on, there is no attention given to the player doing the most thankless role.
It was hoped that this would change with Boris “magixx” Vorobiev taking over the IGL role, and to some degree, it has. In his final three months as Spirit’s leader, Leonid “chopper” Vishnyakov’s entry score on HLTV was 53, while magixx’s since returning to the active lineup is 67. These scores, although not always reliable for viewing a player’s proficiency within a role, show their tendency to do that role, and Magixx’s is much closer to what you would expect in the modern meta.
The problem is that the change hasn’t removed the existence of the doom role in Spirit’s system. The increase in magixx’s score is a result of his 33.1% opening deaths traded percentage, not of bombsite entrying. That role has now been handed off to fellow returning star Myrsolav “zont1x” Plakhotia, whose 2025 entry score of 29 has shot up to 40, while his 2025 T side rating has nosedived from 1.05 to 0.84.
This is another example of horrendous misprofiling by Spirit and their coach, Sergey “hally” Shavaev, except it should be even more obvious that it wouldn’t work with zont1x. The Ukrainian is famous for his seeming inability to land headshots, with his 38.4% in 2025 more in line with AWPers than rifles. Hitting headshots is an important ability for aggressive players, one that passive players can just about cope without due to their tendency to catch players with their backs turned.
Limited System
When we interviewed Alex “Mauisnake” Ellenberg at the StarLadder Budapest Major, one thing he picked up on was over-reliance on Danil “donk” Kryshkovets in Spirit’s system.
“Chopper and hally have a very unique, but actually quite enviable problem where they have the best opener in the world,” he said. “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.”
While it is understandable that hally would look to rely on a player as effective as donk, it also doesn’t have to be that way, and a better coach would rely on it. In Dmitri “sh1ro” Sokolov, Spirit have one of the best AWPers in the world, and in Andrey “tN1R” Tatarinovich, they also have a lurker capable of being a star for most teams in the world. A stronger system would utilise these players to their fullest potential, rather than trying to force it all through donk.
“So much of their form depends on whether donk performs at an otherworldly level,” Mauisnake explained. “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.”
Now that we’ve seen Spirit with and without chopper, and Zweih with and without Spirit, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that this is then the fault of hally. Hally has arguably the greatest ever player to touch Counter-Strike at his disposal, and one of the best AWPers, too, yet despite that, as other teams look to spread their firepower across their five players, Spirit have failed to reach anything close to the dominance of Vitality in 2025, or even NAVI in 2024.
As time goes on, it feels like this can only be a result of hally’s too-rigid system. Zweih has thus far thrived in PARIVISION, with his numbers back to where they were with Nemiga. Meanwhile, Spirit have struggled to get past a poor tier-two team in SINNERS and suffered an underdog defeat at the hands of PARIVISION. This has to change as Spirit look to lift more trophies in an attempt to keep their star man happy, and although he may be (for some reason) revered, hally might be the next figure on the chopping block in order for that to happen.
