Biography
Mathieu Herbaut (born November 9, 2000), better known as ZywOo, is a French professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player for Team Vitality. He is considered one of the best players in Global Offensive history, having been ranked the No. 1 player in the world by HLTV in 2019 and 2020. He is also sometimes nicknamed “The Chosen One” due to being born on the day of the original Counter Strike game’s commercial release.
Career
2018
After completing his bachelor’s degree, Mathieu was able to take up esports professionally and sign a contract with Team Vitality. The results came quickly, as they won DreamHack Open Atlanta 2018 in November. The next month, he and his team qualified for the minor qualifier for the next Major, Katowice Major 2019. In the Minors, Vitality landed in second place, securing a spot for the Major in Katowice.
2019
The results of ZywOo and his team were not that brilliant in the Majors: as they ended up finishing in 9-11th in Katowice Major 2019 and then a 5-8th place in StarLadder Berlin Major 2019. They still went on to win in two top-tier tournaments of the – Season , ECS – Season 7 Finals and EPICENTER 2019, and finished second twice at ESL One Cologne 2019 and DreamHack Masters Malmö 2019.
Mathieu’s individual stats were impressive for that year: he finished MVP 5 times and had a 1.30 overall rating in LAN events. In January 2020, Mathieu Herbaut was voted as the World’s Best Player of the Year 2019 by HLTV.org, thus becoming the first French and the youngest player to receive this award since its inception in 2010.
2020
Due to the transition of tournaments to online (due to COVID-19), many tournaments did not take place and were postponed or cancelled. HLTV.org had published the final rankings of the best players in CS:GO for 2020; in which for the second year in a row, the Team Vitality player won the award. Behind him was Natus Vincere’s Oleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev, and Nicolai ‘device’ Reedtz from Astralis closed out the top three.
CS:GO
CS:GO Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO for short) is a computer game from the genre of online tactical shooters. It was developed by Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment and is the fourth part of the Counter-Strike series. The game was released on August 21, 2012 for Windows, Linux, macOS, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. A release for the PlayStation 3 in Europe failed to materialize for unknown reasons. Global Offensive achieved a Metascore of 83 points. Since September 14, 2017, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has also been available in China via the Perfect World client. In December 2018, the game was switched to a free-to-play model, which drew criticism.