After a disastrous season in 2025, BIG has taken the international route with the addition of Belarusian AWPer Gleb “gr1ks” Gazin, the German organization announced on October 10. The move sees BIG bench Marcel “hyped” Köhn, and consequently, abandon an all-German roster.
Gr1ks is one of the most exciting young AWPers in the CS2 scene, so, understandably, BIG is willing to switch up their communication from German to English to accommodate him. Gr1ks was going to play in tier-one this year, but HEROIC benched him after just two tournaments, citing that his playstyle didn’t align with the rest of the team.
The Belarusian is excited to put that turbulent period to bed, he said in a personal statement:
The start of this season was incredibly turbulent and filled with emotions and worries. I’m excited to start training fully and show my game on the server again.
Now, he’ll be one of the players responsible for trying to make BIG a tier-one team again. The German organization missed qualifying for both the BLAST.tv Austin Major and the StarLadder Budapest Major in 2025, and find themselves in 38th in the global Valve Regional Standings (VRS) as of October 10.
It’s worth noting that BIG had success when they pivoted from all-German rosters in the past. BIG peaked at No.1 in the world in HLTV’s ranking in August 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, after winning DreamHack Masters Spring, cs_summit 6, and DreamHack Open Summer on the back of incredible performances from Turkish star İsmailсan “XANTARES” Dörtkardeş.
They also did reasonably well in 2018, when they switched the comms from German to English to accommodate the British AWPer Owen “smooya” Butterfield. In that year, BIG had a Cinderella run at ESL One Cologne and finished as runners-up.
Gr1ks could be that high-impact AWPer that tabseN desperately needs. Credit: Adam Lakomy | © ESL
For instance, gr1ks has definitely been better than hyped this year, as you can see in the statistics below.
| hyped | gr1ks |
|---|---|
| 0.98 rating | 1.14 rating |
| 67.5 ADR | 78.5 ADR |
| -0.32% Round Swing | +1.83% Round Swing |
| 16.5% Multi-kill | 19.1% Multi-kill |
| 59% Trading score | 73% Trading score |
At 24 years old, it looks like hyped has reached his ceiling. He played twice for BIG’s main roster between 2023 and 2025, but failed to reach the level of Florian “syrsoN” Rische, BIG’s best German AWPer this decade.
Meanwhile, gr1ks is still a 19-year-old, and we haven’t seen his peak. Plus, the Belarusian showed in both Astrum and GUN5 this year that he’s ready to step up from tier-two to tier-one.
All in all, it seems worth making Johannes “tabseN” Wodarz, Karim “Krimbo” Moussa, Jon “JDC” de Castro, and David “prosus” Hesse sacrifice communicating in their mother tongue if the price is adding a promising player like gr1ks.
BIG are set to play at the $25,000 NODWIN Clutch Series 1 playoffs next week, on October 17. The online tournament will also feature the likes of ENCE, Nemiga, and most notably 9INE, who almost qualified for the StarLadder Budapest Major.
Feature image credit: Helena Kristiansson | © ESL
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