Every other Nordic country has had to live in the shadow of Swedish CS' continued excellence throughout the lifespan of Counter-Strike, but at different teams all the other countries have battled for position as the second best Scandinavian country. Finland may have suffered its share of prejudice from the Swedish scene, with frequent complaints that players were online superstars or outright cheaters, but the Finns have had moments in history when they occupied that spot as the second best of the Scandinavians and made their own impact on the international scene.
With teams like
Clan Z, D-Sky and hoorai/69N-28E/roccat/GamePlay the Finns have been able to compete against any country's best teams for international titles. With sides like exousia, Ewok/Ocrana.fi, astralis, logitech.fi, Power Gaming and WinFakt the Finnish flag had been planted following many an upset over some of Europe's better teams. In this piece join me in celebrating the finest players Finland has had to offer, as I give you my top 10 Finnish CS players of all time.
In this second, and final, part I take you from 5 to 1, presenting my top five Finns to ever load up CS. If you missed part one, numbers 10-6, then check that out first.
5. Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen
Biggest accomplishments: 2nd KODE5 2006, 2nd WSVG UK, 3rd WCG 2006, 1st NGL-One S2, 1st WSVG Louisville, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 1st GameGune Mexico, 3rd Arbalet Cup Europe 2009, 4th IEM IV Global Finals, 1st Beat IT finals, 3rd IEM VI Guangzhou, 3rd SEC 2011 and 2nd IEM VI New York.
Of all the areas Finnish CS has been found most lacking in historically tactics would be the number one. Even the top Finnish CS teams were nearly always famed for playing one style of CS, so that against teams which were good matchups they could find success but then against those which could adapt things would fall apart. A huge part of the reasoning behind this is not just the mentality of the top players, which certainly played a role, but also the lack of real tacticians.
lurppis is the only player in Finnish CS history who has legitimately approached the tactical side of the game in the same manner as the best tacticians from countries like Sweden, Germany and Denmark. As a result he has established himself as easily the best Finnish tactician of all time and one of the great Finnish CS players. lurppis did not start out as a tactician comparable to the best from the aforementioned countries, but over time he built himself into one.
While his biggest accomplishments came with 69N-28E the best examples of his work as an in-game leader are his time spent in wings, 
EG and WinFakt. In Wings he was a part of a lineup of complete unknowns who rose up to being a top 10 team. In EG he helped resurrect the careers of fRoD and Storm, as they managed to grab a few nice placings despite never being a top 5 team in the world. Then in WinFakt he had transformed into a gob b type character, who was capable of putting seemingly any players into his framework of how a team should operate and then being capable of making them competitive with the top teams.
For those who would hold up roccat/GamePlay's 2008 run without him and WinFakt's Copenhagen Games 2012 3rd place with a stand-in in his place as some damning indictment of how little impact he had on those teams I'd say you've missed the point of both of those examples. That roccat/GamePlay lineup basically stacked their roster with skilled players and reused the tactics from the lurppis era to get some top 4 placings.
Even the fashion in which they got those placings shows the key difference: those teams were capable of upsetting the top teams but not winning any of the tournaments. They would repeatedly upset a big name or two and then bow out before they got a real chance at doing something special. Sound familiar? Skip ahead to WinFakt's run and we see the same thing again: running the lurppis playbook and upsetting some big names before disappearing prior to the title being contested.
With a lineup of skilled players, a set playbook of tactics which don't change and some confidence upsets are very doable, but winning titles is almost impossible. Without a legitimate top tier tactician a team can gain more upsets, by playing more randomly/unpredictably, but they cannot compete for titles because that takes consistent play and good adaptation to the different enemies's styles, game in and game out.
lurppis was not the model tactician in the exact same way players like 
ave, 
Zeus and 
gob b were, but he had a good enough all-around tactical approach that he gave his teams a chance to compete, even though they often had less skilled lineups than their opponents's. So despite his failings lurppis' impact on Finnish CS is of great significance, and over such a long span of time, that he outranks players who were much better individually, but over much shorter periods of time. It's also worth adding that amongst tacticians he was one of the better fraggers, and could fill in gaps in his teams by playing unwanted roles as both T and CT.
4. Juuso "contE" Sajakoski
Biggest accomplishments: 2nd KODE5 2006, 2nd WSVG UK, 3rd WCG 2006, 1st NGL-One S2, 1st WSVG Louisville, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 2nd Dreamhack Summer 2008, 4th ESWC Masters Paris 2008, 3rd IEM III Dubai and 2nd WEM 2009.
There was a span of around three years (mid-2006 to mid-2009) when contE was considered by fans and players alike to be the second best player in Finland, after ruuit. Coupled with that team-mate he made a great duo, as his aptitude for being the last man standing and winning clutch rounds lined up with ruuit's famed early round aggression and ability to take out multiple opponents in a burst of action. ruuit killed enemies and damaged others so that contE's job was often outpositioning wounded enemies to win multiple 1v1s and the round.
I think sometimes people overrated the impact of contE's end of the deal in light of the way ruuit made that job a lot easier thanks to his part. If you're the guy who gets the last kills and wins the round you look like a hero, even if you had a health advantage over opponents who had been subjected to the damage output of ruuit, naSu and plastE before they ever ran into you. With that said contE's play was certainly a key to the success of the hoorai/69N-28E/roccat/GamePlay lineups he played in. As far as closers go contE was one of the best in the world and certainly the best in Finland for a few years.
It's unfortunate contE had such a negative effect on his teams in terms of morale and cohesion, else he might have accomplished much more and perhaps placed higher on this list. There are some stars who play well in-game and outside of the game instill confidence in their team-mates and contructively drive them to higher heights. In contE's case his approach to the game was of being stubborn and unwilling to accept responsibility for any part of the big losses his teams had, leading to divisive comments, which destroyed team morale, and even manipulating some of his team-mates to have others removed.
In professional sports I've heard it remarked that the great players make the players around them better, in that respect contE failed miserably over and over. In terms of his own individual game, and a couple of the years when things weren't as bad in his teams, he deserves his spot here on my list as one of the great Finnish players.
3. Samu "plastE" Aalto
Biggest accomplishments: 4th GameGune 2007, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 2nd Dreamhack Summer 2008, 4th ESWC Masters Paris 2008, 3rd IEM III Dubai, 2nd WEM 2009 and 3rd SEC 2010.
When plastE became known it was in a similar vein to someone like JiGetus in later years: a skilled rifler known for his movies and occasional big performances for the second best Finnish team of the time. Unlike JiGetus when he finally got his shot in the top Finnish team plastE was able to develop into much more. His first run with the team, in late 2007, was not so successful, but the second time around, when he replaced lurppis in May of 2008, saw him begin to flourish as an individual player. Used as a small bombsite CT specialist plastE established himself as a mainstay of that role for the rest of his career. Despite playing in a lineup with the likes of ruuit and naSu plastE was able to showcase impressive aim and ability to frag.
The real tragedy of plastE's career is that the timing of his development was out of synch with the prime periods of his team-mates's play. While ruuit and naSu were at their heights in 2007 and 2008 plastE was still finding his feet at the top level and had not established himself as a true star player, instead playing a specific role. In 2009 he finally hit super saiyan level and became a star player in his own right, taking over the mantle of best Finnish player in my eyes.
Sadly ruuit and naSu were not playing at quite the same level anymore and his teams were no longer in position to compete for championships. For Finnish CS fans there will always be the fantasy scenario of "what if plastE had gotten to that level a year earlier, when the others were at their peaks" but we will obviously never know what could have been possible.
To use a hockey example one could consider the great "what if" of Mario Lemieux's first retirement, due to debilitating injury, meaning he missed out on most of the prime years of team-mate Jaromir Jagr's career, who was was himself also a dominant scorer and league MVP during the years Lemieux was out. Just as we'll never know what the two could have done together with coinciding peak play so we'll never know how high roccat/GamePlay could have soared with plastE, ruuit, naSu and contE all in peak form at the same exact time.
What we do know is that plastE was one of the very best Finnish CS players of all time, both in terms of skill and his impact on how his teams operated. He gave his teams something that was indispensable and despite the fairly unflattering manner in which his WinFakt career came to a close he should always be considered one of the most skilled players to ever come out of Finland.
2. Niko "naSu" Kovanen
Biggest accomplishments: 2nd KODE5 2006, 2nd WSVG UK, 3rd WCG 2006, 1st NGL-One S2, 1st WSVG Louisville, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 2nd Dreamhack Summer 2008, 4th ESWC Masters Paris 2008, 3rd IEM III Dubai, 2nd WEM 2009, 3rd SEC 2010, 3rd IEM VI Guangzhou, 3rd SEC 2011 and 2nd IEM VI New York.
I anticipate naSu being ranked so highly in this list may come as a surprise to some but I think it's more than justified when you consider his entire career. naSu is one of the few players in CS history who really could do it all: he could be your main star/fragger, he could be your workhorse doing the bitch work, he could teamplay with another player and he could close out rounds by winning in clutch situations. It is not possible to overstate how incredible that level of versatility is. The vast majority of CS players, including the great star players of all time, were specialists and had their set roles which they stuck with, their teams building around them by adding pieces which could fit into the other roles.
naSu was a player who could have been a star, and was early on in his career, but was willing and more importantly capable of playing the roles usually reserved for those who aren't of the calibre of the stars. With wings/serious naSu was the main force driving them from absolute unknowns to a team breaking into the realm of the top 10 international sides. Then with the introduction of ruuit and contE naSu was able to transition to playing more teamplay roles, to facilitate those star players' specialised roles.
Perhaps naSu's finest year of play was 2008, which was largely marked by his brother lurppis' absence, as he had numerous big games and won some memorable clutch rounds to help put roccat/GamePlay over the top against elite opponents. There seemed to be so little actual teething problems for naSu as a top player, despite the fact he was wings' best player, helping them to upsets, at age 16. Even in his latter days with WinFakt the impact of his play was noticeable as once he left the lineup they struggled to find any consistency and lacked for a player who do as many different things as he could.
naSu's impact is perhaps deceptive since his play set the stage for players like ruuit, contE and plastE to shine most brightly in his teams. Yet when I think back on that 2008 when his team was most dangerous I can't help but feel sure if you replaced him with any other Finnish player than their upsets would have been much fewer and their low points much more drastic. The Swiss army knife of Finnish CS earned his rank of second best Finnish CS player of all time with a solid half a decade of top level play across a variety of roles, depending on what his teams needed.
1. Max Oskari "ruuit" Aspe
Biggest accomplishments: 2nd KODE5 2006, 2nd WSVG UK, 3rd WCG 2006, 1st NGL-One S2, 1st WSVG Louisville, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 2nd Dreamhack Summer 2008, 4th ESWC Masters Paris 2008, 3rd IEM III Dubai, 2nd WEM 2009 and 3rd SEC 2010.
ruuit is one of the most talented and dangerous players in the history of CS, beyond even just Finnish CS. The amount of offensive damage he could wreak on opponents from both sides of the game was out of this world and you have to look to players like f0rest, NEO and zet to even find people in a similar range of damage output of that variety. ruuit's achilles heel was that he could be just as dangerous to his own teams.
ruuit always walked a very fine line, as very aggressive players always do, of either doing an incredible amount of damage and practically winning his team the round there and then or unnecessarily dying early and in a bad position for his team, leading to them likely losing the round. At times he won his team games almost single-handidly and in scenarios they would have been favoured to lose in, yet at other times he repeated pushed too much and overstretched himself, so that he fell flat on his face and his team lost the match largely due to him.
ruuit's talent level was so high and he was so fearless that his style was often effective, but against the elite teams any small mistakes or lapses in judgement become magnified into huge game-changing errors. He was the weapon his teams lived and died by. It's significant to note that 69N-28E/roccat/GamePlay's best success came from allowing ruuit to play however he wanted while surrounding him with players who could facilitate his style of play.
With naSu and contE in your lineup, and later plastE, you can afford to allow a player like ruuit to take risks. When he fails those players can keep you in the game and provide consistency, while in times he succeeds you will be pushed right up over the top and be capable of beating practically any team in the world.
The strange thing about ruuit is that his talent level was incredible, he produced some great single game performances and he was the only Finnish player in history who you could put in the top 5 players in the world for a couple of years in a row, yet he was also quite fundamentally flawed as a player. Look at any other great player in history and you'll find that if they weren't widly successful then it was likely due to some external issue: REAL did a poor job of motivating and improving his team-mates, solo and cogu lacked enough team-mates of a high enough calibre etc.
With ruuit his key flaw is that he abused his talent and relied on it as a crutch. Had he found a better balance of being aggressive during times he was on his game and playing more reserved or thoughtfully when his game was not on then he could have been an even greater player and led his team to perhaps even some more tournament victories. The greatest Finnish CS player of all time and one of the all time great CS players from any country but also a player who didn't develop his talent enough and could have been even greater.
There's the top five Finnish CS players of all time, in my estimations. Who would be in your top five and in what order?
If you missed out on part one then check that to see who I had in places 10-6. This feature will return in the future to rank the top 10 players from another country.
With teams like
Clan Z, D-Sky and hoorai/69N-28E/roccat/GamePlay the Finns have been able to compete against any country's best teams for international titles. With sides like exousia, Ewok/Ocrana.fi, astralis, logitech.fi, Power Gaming and WinFakt the Finnish flag had been planted following many an upset over some of Europe's better teams. In this piece join me in celebrating the finest players Finland has had to offer, as I give you my top 10 Finnish CS players of all time.In this second, and final, part I take you from 5 to 1, presenting my top five Finns to ever load up CS. If you missed part one, numbers 10-6, then check that out first.
5.
Tomi "lurppis" KovanenBiggest accomplishments: 2nd KODE5 2006, 2nd WSVG UK, 3rd WCG 2006, 1st NGL-One S2, 1st WSVG Louisville, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 1st GameGune Mexico, 3rd Arbalet Cup Europe 2009, 4th IEM IV Global Finals, 1st Beat IT finals, 3rd IEM VI Guangzhou, 3rd SEC 2011 and 2nd IEM VI New York.
Of all the areas Finnish CS has been found most lacking in historically tactics would be the number one. Even the top Finnish CS teams were nearly always famed for playing one style of CS, so that against teams which were good matchups they could find success but then against those which could adapt things would fall apart. A huge part of the reasoning behind this is not just the mentality of the top players, which certainly played a role, but also the lack of real tacticians.
lurppis is the only player in Finnish CS history who has legitimately approached the tactical side of the game in the same manner as the best tacticians from countries like Sweden, Germany and Denmark. As a result he has established himself as easily the best Finnish tactician of all time and one of the great Finnish CS players. lurppis did not start out as a tactician comparable to the best from the aforementioned countries, but over time he built himself into one.
While his biggest accomplishments came with 69N-28E the best examples of his work as an in-game leader are his time spent in wings, EG and WinFakt. In Wings he was a part of a lineup of complete unknowns who rose up to being a top 10 team. In EG he helped resurrect the careers of fRoD and Storm, as they managed to grab a few nice placings despite never being a top 5 team in the world. Then in WinFakt he had transformed into a gob b type character, who was capable of putting seemingly any players into his framework of how a team should operate and then being capable of making them competitive with the top teams.For those who would hold up
roccat/GamePlay's 2008 run without him and WinFakt's Copenhagen Games 2012 3rd place with a stand-in in his place as some damning indictment of how little impact he had on those teams I'd say you've missed the point of both of those examples. That roccat/GamePlay lineup basically stacked their roster with skilled players and reused the tactics from the lurppis era to get some top 4 placings.Even the fashion in which they got those placings shows the key difference: those teams were capable of upsetting the top teams but not winning any of the tournaments. They would repeatedly upset a big name or two and then bow out before they got a real chance at doing something special. Sound familiar? Skip ahead to WinFakt's run and we see the same thing again: running the lurppis playbook and upsetting some big names before disappearing prior to the title being contested.
With a lineup of skilled players, a set playbook of tactics which don't change and some confidence upsets are very doable, but winning titles is almost impossible. Without a legitimate top tier tactician a team can gain more upsets, by playing more randomly/unpredictably, but they cannot compete for titles because that takes consistent play and good adaptation to the different enemies's styles, game in and game out.
lurppis was not the model tactician in the exact same way players like ave, Zeus and gob b were, but he had a good enough all-around tactical approach that he gave his teams a chance to compete, even though they often had less skilled lineups than their opponents's. So despite his failings lurppis' impact on Finnish CS is of great significance, and over such a long span of time, that he outranks players who were much better individually, but over much shorter periods of time. It's also worth adding that amongst tacticians he was one of the better fraggers, and could fill in gaps in his teams by playing unwanted roles as both T and CT.4.
Juuso "contE" SajakoskiBiggest accomplishments: 2nd KODE5 2006, 2nd WSVG UK, 3rd WCG 2006, 1st NGL-One S2, 1st WSVG Louisville, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 2nd Dreamhack Summer 2008, 4th ESWC Masters Paris 2008, 3rd IEM III Dubai and 2nd WEM 2009.
There was a span of around three years (mid-2006 to mid-2009) when contE was considered by fans and players alike to be the second best player in Finland, after ruuit. Coupled with that team-mate he made a great duo, as his aptitude for being the last man standing and winning clutch rounds lined up with ruuit's famed early round aggression and ability to take out multiple opponents in a burst of action. ruuit killed enemies and damaged others so that contE's job was often outpositioning wounded enemies to win multiple 1v1s and the round.I think sometimes people overrated the impact of contE's end of the deal in light of the way ruuit made that job a lot easier thanks to his part. If you're the guy who gets the last kills and wins the round you look like a hero, even if you had a health advantage over opponents who had been subjected to the damage output of ruuit, naSu and plastE before they ever ran into you. With that said contE's play was certainly a key to the success of the hoorai/69N-28E/roccat/GamePlay lineups he played in. As far as closers go contE was one of the best in the world and certainly the best in Finland for a few years.
It's unfortunate contE had such a negative effect on his teams in terms of morale and cohesion, else he might have accomplished much more and perhaps placed higher on this list. There are some stars who play well in-game and outside of the game instill confidence in their team-mates and contructively drive them to higher heights. In contE's case his approach to the game was of being stubborn and unwilling to accept responsibility for any part of the big losses his teams had, leading to divisive comments, which destroyed team morale, and even manipulating some of his team-mates to have others removed.In professional sports I've heard it remarked that the great players make the players around them better, in that respect contE failed miserably over and over. In terms of his own individual game, and a couple of the years when things weren't as bad in his teams, he deserves his spot here on my list as one of the great Finnish players.
3.
Samu "plastE" AaltoBiggest accomplishments: 4th GameGune 2007, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 2nd Dreamhack Summer 2008, 4th ESWC Masters Paris 2008, 3rd IEM III Dubai, 2nd WEM 2009 and 3rd SEC 2010.
When plastE became known it was in a similar vein to someone like JiGetus in later years: a skilled rifler known for his movies and occasional big performances for the second best Finnish team of the time. Unlike JiGetus when he finally got his shot in the top Finnish team plastE was able to develop into much more. His first run with the team, in late 2007, was not so successful, but the second time around, when he replaced lurppis in May of 2008, saw him begin to flourish as an individual player. Used as a small bombsite CT specialist plastE established himself as a mainstay of that role for the rest of his career. Despite playing in a lineup with the likes of ruuit and naSu plastE was able to showcase impressive aim and ability to frag.The real tragedy of plastE's career is that the timing of his development was out of synch with the prime periods of his team-mates's play. While ruuit and naSu were at their heights in 2007 and 2008 plastE was still finding his feet at the top level and had not established himself as a true star player, instead playing a specific role. In 2009 he finally hit super saiyan level and became a star player in his own right, taking over the mantle of best Finnish player in my eyes.
Sadly ruuit and naSu were not playing at quite the same level anymore and his teams were no longer in position to compete for championships. For Finnish CS fans there will always be the fantasy scenario of "what if plastE had gotten to that level a year earlier, when the others were at their peaks" but we will obviously never know what could have been possible.
To use a hockey example one could consider the great "what if" of Mario Lemieux's first retirement, due to debilitating injury, meaning he missed out on most of the prime years of team-mate Jaromir Jagr's career, who was was himself also a dominant scorer and league MVP during the years Lemieux was out. Just as we'll never know what the two could have done together with coinciding peak play so we'll never know how high roccat/GamePlay could have soared with plastE, ruuit, naSu and contE all in peak form at the same exact time.What we do know is that plastE was one of the very best Finnish CS players of all time, both in terms of skill and his impact on how his teams operated. He gave his teams something that was indispensable and despite the fairly unflattering manner in which his WinFakt career came to a close he should always be considered one of the most skilled players to ever come out of Finland.
2.
Niko "naSu" KovanenBiggest accomplishments: 2nd KODE5 2006, 2nd WSVG UK, 3rd WCG 2006, 1st NGL-One S2, 1st WSVG Louisville, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 2nd Dreamhack Summer 2008, 4th ESWC Masters Paris 2008, 3rd IEM III Dubai, 2nd WEM 2009, 3rd SEC 2010, 3rd IEM VI Guangzhou, 3rd SEC 2011 and 2nd IEM VI New York.
I anticipate naSu being ranked so highly in this list may come as a surprise to some but I think it's more than justified when you consider his entire career. naSu is one of the few players in CS history who really could do it all: he could be your main star/fragger, he could be your workhorse doing the bitch work, he could teamplay with another player and he could close out rounds by winning in clutch situations. It is not possible to overstate how incredible that level of versatility is. The vast majority of CS players, including the great star players of all time, were specialists and had their set roles which they stuck with, their teams building around them by adding pieces which could fit into the other roles.naSu was a player who could have been a star, and was early on in his career, but was willing and more importantly capable of playing the roles usually reserved for those who aren't of the calibre of the stars. With wings/serious naSu was the main force driving them from absolute unknowns to a team breaking into the realm of the top 10 international sides. Then with the introduction of ruuit and contE naSu was able to transition to playing more teamplay roles, to facilitate those star players' specialised roles.
Perhaps naSu's finest year of play was 2008, which was largely marked by his brother lurppis' absence, as he had numerous big games and won some memorable clutch rounds to help put roccat/GamePlay over the top against elite opponents. There seemed to be so little actual teething problems for naSu as a top player, despite the fact he was wings' best player, helping them to upsets, at age 16. Even in his latter days with WinFakt the impact of his play was noticeable as once he left the lineup they struggled to find any consistency and lacked for a player who do as many different things as he could.naSu's impact is perhaps deceptive since his play set the stage for players like ruuit, contE and plastE to shine most brightly in his teams. Yet when I think back on that 2008 when his team was most dangerous I can't help but feel sure if you replaced him with any other Finnish player than their upsets would have been much fewer and their low points much more drastic. The Swiss army knife of Finnish CS earned his rank of second best Finnish CS player of all time with a solid half a decade of top level play across a variety of roles, depending on what his teams needed.
1.
Max Oskari "ruuit" AspeBiggest accomplishments: 2nd KODE5 2006, 2nd WSVG UK, 3rd WCG 2006, 1st NGL-One S2, 1st WSVG Louisville, 3rd IEM II LA, 2nd NGL-One S4, 2nd Dreamhack Summer 2008, 4th ESWC Masters Paris 2008, 3rd IEM III Dubai, 2nd WEM 2009 and 3rd SEC 2010.
ruuit is one of the most talented and dangerous players in the history of CS, beyond even just Finnish CS. The amount of offensive damage he could wreak on opponents from both sides of the game was out of this world and you have to look to players like f0rest, NEO and zet to even find people in a similar range of damage output of that variety. ruuit's achilles heel was that he could be just as dangerous to his own teams.
ruuit always walked a very fine line, as very aggressive players always do, of either doing an incredible amount of damage and practically winning his team the round there and then or unnecessarily dying early and in a bad position for his team, leading to them likely losing the round. At times he won his team games almost single-handidly and in scenarios they would have been favoured to lose in, yet at other times he repeated pushed too much and overstretched himself, so that he fell flat on his face and his team lost the match largely due to him.ruuit's talent level was so high and he was so fearless that his style was often effective, but against the elite teams any small mistakes or lapses in judgement become magnified into huge game-changing errors. He was the weapon his teams lived and died by. It's significant to note that 69N-28E/roccat/GamePlay's best success came from allowing ruuit to play however he wanted while surrounding him with players who could facilitate his style of play.
With naSu and contE in your lineup, and later plastE, you can afford to allow a player like ruuit to take risks. When he fails those players can keep you in the game and provide consistency, while in times he succeeds you will be pushed right up over the top and be capable of beating practically any team in the world.
The strange thing about ruuit is that his talent level was incredible, he produced some great single game performances and he was the only Finnish player in history who you could put in the top 5 players in the world for a couple of years in a row, yet he was also quite fundamentally flawed as a player. Look at any other great player in history and you'll find that if they weren't widly successful then it was likely due to some external issue: REAL did a poor job of motivating and improving his team-mates, solo and cogu lacked enough team-mates of a high enough calibre etc.With ruuit his key flaw is that he abused his talent and relied on it as a crutch. Had he found a better balance of being aggressive during times he was on his game and playing more reserved or thoughtfully when his game was not on then he could have been an even greater player and led his team to perhaps even some more tournament victories. The greatest Finnish CS player of all time and one of the all time great CS players from any country but also a player who didn't develop his talent enough and could have been even greater.
There's the top five Finnish CS players of all time, in my estimations. Who would be in your top five and in what order?
If you missed out on part one then check that to see who I had in places 10-6. This feature will return in the future to rank the top 10 players from another country.
