Does anyone know where DeadFox is?

Does anyone care?

It’s not that difficult to get nasty memes out of the Twitch crowd, but not many CS:GO players were treated more often to the BOT- treatment as DeadFox, HellRaisers’ meme-worthy Hungarian AWPer-turned-support player who seemed to have an uncanny ability to mess up the simplest of situations only to partially redeem himself with the occasional clutch. Consistently awful ratings and a downgrade from the big green gun made his presence in the team less and less understandable over time, and while he’s likely permanently gone from the side and the top tier of Counter-Strike, at least he was kind enough to give us a truly despicable meme to remember him by.

The discussions about DeadFox always seem to miss the point. No one’s really saying that he’s a useless Counter-Strike player, but it’s difficult to make a legitimate argument about why he would warrant a place on any top 30 side under normal circumstances. He joined HellRaisers after a trial period in the autumn of 2016 as their new AWPer, showcasing real promise – something which hasn’t panned out. Just take a look at his HLTV ratings over time:

To be fair, it’s not like he was the primary wielder of the big green gun all this time, but this fact is quite damning by itself. Not many AWPers made the transition to a support role because they’re so great at sniping – or in general, for that matter. His inconsistencies were masked by occasional clutches, but the overall numbers clearly indicate that he couldn’t cut it at the top level.

Sometimes arguments are made about DeadFox’s importance in the team’s so-called “great tournament showings”, which is a misnomer to say the least. Keep in mind that HellRaisers’ playoff run at the major came off the back of the awful Swiss system, making it to the top eight without having to beat a single top ten side in the world. It’s no wonder the team failed to make any sort of impact at other LAN events, and that their biggest winnings came from the overinflated prize pool of the V4 Future Sports Festival, where they only received an invite because of DeadFox’s nationality. Even there, they failed to beat any of the non-irrelevant participants.

Of course, most of us remember DeadFox because of that infamous Facebook post where he lashed out at his detractors, writing that “I play the most despicable positions”, getting angry about community reactions over a video where he said that “without me, there would be no HR”. For non-native speakers, the post itself is ridden with spelling and grammar errors, and reading it makes it seem feels unlikely that he’d be able to reliably use four-syllable words in his native language.

Yes, but what about those all-important intangibles, I hear the fans ask? Well, there’s nothing to suggest that DeadFox excelled at a support role in the way STYKO or TACO has – picking it up after what was essentially a demotion from the AWPer position, remember –, and the argument that he was such a great teammate in some ethereal way is one of those typical unfalsifiable CS:GO-related statements that are better off ignored. Has anyone missed his contributions since his removal?

Or to put it another way, which team would benefit from his particular set of skills? Someone like STYKO or TACO immediately found at least a loan position in the international field because their abilities were clearly valued in some capacity. Meanwhile, DeadFox’s last games on HLTV feature a Hungarian mix called “pzd” that I actually couldn’t find anything about even on local sites and it doesn’t look like teams are lining up to poach him. Benched for over a month and a half now and potentially looking at a return to the absolutely irrelevant domestic scene, it’s quite possible his only lasting contribution to the CS:GO world will be that unprofessional Facebook post.