At the end of the week, Sergey «Ax1Le» Rykhtorov won the MVP title at IEM Dallas in Texas. For the player, this is the first award of this kind received at a LAN tournament. Before that, he was MVP twice, but only at online events such as ESL Pro League and IEM Summer. Ax1Le had one of the best performances of his career and led Cloud9 to their first win at a major event.
The cyber athlete not only posted an average rating of 1.32, but also showed impressive consistency in all the matches his team played. On each of the sixteen maps his team played in Dallas, Ax1Le's rating was greater than one, and on thirteen of them – greater than 1.15.
Ax1Le's closest rival for the MVP title was another Cloud9 player, Dimiotrii «sh1ro» Sokolov. As a result, Ax1Le surpassed the competitors in almost all parameters: it dealt the most damage per round, and also took the second place in the number of opponents killed per round.
The match Cloud9 vs FaZe, in which the Russian team managed to win over the strongest team in the world, can be called especially remarkable. Ax1Le was the player that gave Cloud9 the advantage on the two maps they won to advance to the semifinals. This was followed by equally successful matches against BIG and ENCE.