Spirit opened their BLAST Open Porto campaign on August 26 with a 2-0 win over DENDELE, taking Ancient 13-8 and Cache 13-7, three days after lifting the Esports World Cup trophy in Paris.
The series belonged to Danil "donk" Kryshkovets. According to HLTV, he became the first Counter-Strike 2 player to reach 20 aces at HLTV MVP-caliber events, moving clear of Mathieu "ZywOo" Herbaut and Nikola "NiKo" Kovac, who sit on 18 apiece.
Both of the aces came on Cache, and one of them arrived in the map's opening pistol round, where donk dealt 500 damage without taking any himself. HLTV counts only three other rounds at events of that caliber in which a player has dealt 500 damage and received none.
The other 500-damage rounds HLTV lists
- Joao "koala" Pfeffer of DENDELE, who dualied his way to a pistol ace holding B apartments against TYLOO in the first stage of the IEM Cologne Major
- Danil "molodoy" Golubenko, on a Mirage B defense with the AWP against Passion UA at IEM Rio 2026, in a play that closed out the series
- Bugra "Calyx" Arkin at ESL Pro League Season 20 in 2024, against a FlyQuest half-buy that rushed him through smoke on Dust2's B site
donk's numbers held up beyond the aces. He topped the scoreboard on Ancient with 24 kills, 125.1 ADR and a +7.79% round swing for a 1.97 rating, then followed it with a 2.34 rating on Cache, where he again finished on 24 kills with 133.9 ADR and a +10.94% swing.
The count HLTV keeps is not a career total: it is restricted to what the site calls MVP-caliber events, so every one of donk's 20 penta-kill rounds came against the top tier of opposition. The 500-damage round is scoped the same way, which is what makes three prior occurrences the whole list.
The result put Spirit into a Group A upper semi-final against G2, with a place at the Super Bock Arena in Porto on the line, and dropped DENDELE into the lower bracket against Aurora.