Sh1ro Criticizes Esports Awards 2021 for Excluding Groove From Esports Coach of the Year

Gambit Esports has slowly risen through the ranks of competitive CS:GO (Counter Strike: Global Offensive) since the start of 2021, proving themselves to be one of the best teams in the world. They have won big tournaments this year like IEM Katowice 2021, EPIC CIS League Spring 2021, IEM Summer 2021, and IEM Fall 2021: CIS. While the players have been hailed for putting up top notch performances and great individual prowess, Dmitry "sh1ro" Sokolov contributes this victory to their part time coach and CEO of Gambit Esports - Konstantin "groove" Pikiner.

This is the exact reason as to why he was upset when groove was not nominated under the category of 'Esports Coach of the Year', which included the coach of Gambit's Valorant roster Andrey "Engh" Sholokhov for leading them to victory at VCT 2021: Stage 3 Masters - Berlin.

Sh1ro points out why Gambit's CEO groove deserved an 'Esports Coach of the Year' nomination

The ace player for Gambit Esports, sh1ro, who was recently nominated for the Esports Awards 2021 under the category of 'Esports PC Rookie of the Year', had a few points to make about their part-time coach groove.

Groove who is the CEO of Gambit Esports was also acting as the coach of their CS:GO team from September 2020 to October 2021, as Ivan "F_1N" Kochugov had been handed a 8.75 month ban by the ESIC for having exploited the coach spectator bug.

During this time as pointed out by sh1ro, Gambit went on to reach the grand finals of 15 CS:GO tournaments, attaining a first-place finish in 11 of them. Apart from this, the organization had also managed to attain rank one across HLTV, ESL World Rankings, CSPAA World Ranking, and BLAST Premier World Leaderboard, before IEM Cologne 2021.

All this was achieved by a roster which constituted of four academy players, while groove alongside his coaching also had to carry out his administrative duties as the the organization's CEO.

Having pointed out all these facts, sh1ro went on to ask the Esports Awards as to why he was not nominated under the category of 'Esports Coach of the Year'. He is awaiting a response which has not been received, publicly at least, at the time of writing this article.

Gambit's Valorant coach Engh has however been nominated under this category for having pushed the team to win VCT 2021: Stage 3 Masters - Berlin, automatically locking a slot for themselves in the upcoming Valorant Champions 2021.