From beastly rifler to legendary in-game leader, here is Karrigan’s full Counter-Strike story

At the tender age of 35, he is still going strong, as he and his FaZe Clan squad remain regulars at the business end of Counter-Strike 2 tournaments and staying in Major contention throughout the years.

Here is everything you need to know about Karrigan – his career stats, personality, and how he maintained his perch at the top of CS esports for so long.

Who is Karrigan? Personal and family background, explained

Esports athletes come in many forms, with varied trajectories to ultimate gaming success. While there are many stereotypes associated with competitive gamers, not all of them positive – especially from the era when Karrigan came of age, with his first professional team dating back to 2008 in the form of Volt-Gaming – he is one of those players with a strong and stable family background and a big focus on a plan B, having completed a dual Master’s Degree by 2015 alongside his focus on his competitive gaming career.

Also, you know, we’ve got to say the line, the meme: “he wasn’t a classic nerdy computer kid in school he was one of the ones to get a girlfriend first and a very social person typical for finn is that he is very determined ist egal obs jetzt beim kartenspielen ist oder beim tischtennis oder beim computer er gibt nicht auf what he really wants is to win a major it’s his dream and therefore it’s also my dream for him to get that.”

Though it is ancient history in the context of modern Counter-Strike, no overview of Karrigan’s CS career would be complete without surveying the 1.6 landscape, the time when he was one of the best individual riflers in the world. Think NiKo or donk of today! That was Karrigan back in the early 2010s. Even in 2011, he was ranked number 8 on HLTV’s then-nascent rankings lists, and a quick look at any highlight reel will show you how and why he found impact in those early days of Counter-Strike esports.

Karrigan’s time on the CS 1.6 Fnatic team late into the game’s life cycle is where his biggest accomplishments can be found, including the following tournaments:

• 1st at DreamHack Summer 2012
• 1st at GameGune 2012
• 1st at DreamHack Bucharest 2012

Like apEX after him, he completed the arduous transition from star rifler to in-game leader, and it is a testament to his flexibility and all-around excellence that he remains relevant at the highest levels of competitive play at the age of 35, reaching a Major final as recently as in Shanghai.

Those who have come into Counter-Strike esports in the late Global Offensive or early CS2 era may not clock in how good a fragger Karrigan used to be in his prime. But the story that came after that might be even more spectacular.

Stars and stumbles: Karrigan’s early Global Offensive days and the Danish teams that followed

Though Karrigan had a short stint on Fnatic at the beginning of the Global Offensive era – a follow-up to their late-stage “superteam” at the very end of 1.6 –the org moved to an all-Swedish lineup by the time the first Major rolled around in the dying months of 2013, and he therefore missed out on their win at DreamHack Winter 2013.

He had a short stint with mousesports before returning to Fnatic for a short while, and he was on a squad called n!faculty at the time of the first CS:GO Major, with gla1ve, cajunb, Pimp, and raalz as his teammates in an all-Danish affair. They went out in the group stage behind Complexity and VeryGames, and it would ultimately take Karrigan another nine years for him to lift the biggest of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive trophies.

After stints on teams like Reason Gaming and Copenhagen Wolves, with the core of the eventual Danish superteam emerging on Team Dignitas, then TSM, and eventually Astralis, with device, dupreeh, and Xyp9x on the squad as part of the roster that would dominate CS: GO’s latter half. It was a quite well-publicized affair that Karrigan saw the game differently than the players on the squad, and eventually, he made way for gla1ve as he was benched. In an interview many years later, he said that “the biggest change that happened was that we got Kjaerbye instead of cajunb at the time,” referencing role clashes, with differences in opinions on team vetoes and in-game tactics further exacerbating the issues. “If I feel like I have a read, then I have to go with that,” he explained, adding that these experiences underlined how important it is for him to be on an organization where his approach is trusted.

His time on FaZe proved this point, even with Astralis becoming the undisputed best team of the period. That isn’t to say Karrigan’s early CS:GO days didn’t work out for him – here are his most notable tournament results of the period:

• 1st at Fragbite Masters Season 4
• 1st at FACEIT 2015 Stage 2 Finals
• 1st at PGL CS:GO Championship Series Season 1

FaZe 1.0 – the first international Counter-Strike superteam

Even though they are commonplace nowadays in CS2 esports, the idea of an international team was uniquely exotic in the early Global Offensive era. While other competitive games regularly figured teams with players from different nationalities, it seemed like the speed and the precision required in communication for Counter-Strike would make it an exception to that trend, with orgs at the top of the game stubbornly sticking to lineups with players of the same nationality.

FaZe Clan broke this trend, and many others, with Karrigan, forming the first real “superteam” of the Global Offensive era after their initial outing, with the NiKo/olofmeister/GuardiaN/rain/Karrigan lineup serving up monstrous tournament performances in 2017 – it was quite the turnaround for an org that never even made playoffs in CS:GO before Karrigan’s arrival and the new signings that turned the esports landscape upside down.

While FaZe posted some truly spectacular tournament runs that will live long in the memory – their absolute dominance of ESL One New York 2017 being a prime example – the trend that carried across much of Karrigan’s career remained: the team had incredible heights but also an inherent shakiness to it, rarely going to the truly unstoppable era-defining runs of some of their peers. For all their wins, it’s their shock grand final losses that are the most memorable, be it the ELEAGUE Boston Major and their defeat to Cloud9 or their epic ESL One Katowice defeat a few months later to Fnatic. A few months later, Astralis signed Magisk to replace Kjaerbye, and they embarked on the greatest run CS:GO esports would ever see, and as inconsistent results continued, so did Karrigan’s influence in the team dwindle. Eventually, he was moved off from in-game leading duties after the FACEIT London Major and was benched soon after, consigned to a loan to Team Envy and their NA nonamers at the Major Play-Ins.

It could have been the end of it all, but it turned out to be an incredible rebound instead.

A mousesports reunion and a grand redemption

Throughout the Global Offensive era – and ever since CS2 became a thing – mousesports (now MOUZ) were known for unearthing great talent and selling them on at great profit. Even NiKo himself, who ended up as the big gun on FaZe, had his breakout under their flag, with the roster at the time often nicknamed “NiKosports” for his monstrous yet futile hard carry efforts. By the time Karrigan returned (because, lest we forget, he had a stint on the team in the late 1.6 and early CS:GO days), the chrisJ/STYKO/ropz/sunNy/oskar roster’s shock win at StarSeries Season 4, and their short interregnum at the top of the CS world was long a thing of the past, and Karrigan was tasked with rebuilding the roster and his own reputation.

He did both in stellar fashion, turning ropz into one of the greatest riflers of the modern game, unearthing and unlocking the talents of woxic, and launching the career of frozen. Unlike so many of Karrigan’s projects, which are characterized by a “honeymoon” period of sorts of early successes and a fall back later down the line, this mousesports project was a slow start, but it became one of the strongest teams by late 2019, winning the CS:GO Asia Championships, the ESL Pro League Season 10 Finals, and cs_summit 5 in back-to-back-to-back fashion, ending the year with a runner-up finish at EPICENTER 2019.

Like so many things in the world, the project fell apart during the COVID years, with woxic (who was eventually picked up by HenryG’s ill-fated Cloud9 project) especially struggling with ping and motivation during long-distance play. Still, Karrigan did more than enough to warrant another big adventure, and in early 2021, it was time for yet another homecoming for the Danish veteran – back to FaZe Clan, that is.

FaZe 2.0 – a great story that is still being written

It is often said that it is not a good idea to catch back up with your exes, but in the case of Karrigan and FaZe Clan, it ultimately turned out pretty well for both parties, even if it seemed like a rocky affair at the start. After the complete rehabilitation brought along with the Dane’s successes on mousesports, Karrigan returned to FaZe Clan in a leadership role, looking to once again build a superteam.

The parts he was left behind by the previous iterations – namely, players brought along by NiKo’s positive experiences on FPL and coaching insights by YNk, who is no longer coaching anything anywhere – were far from mustard, and the team’s results did not improve initially in the summer of 2021. With olofmeister, the old faithful, coming back and forth from the squad, the roster had a definite temporary vibe in the second half of the year, as the rumored (and really, all but confirmed) pickup of ropz was waiting in the wings, reuniting master and pupil from the mousesports days. The transfer materialized at the beginning of 2022, and the upturn in form and results from that point on was immediate.

FaZe’s romp after the turn of the year eclipsed everything the org had accomplished in 2018 in style and substance alike. Winning IEM Katowice, ESL Pro League Season 15, and the PGL Antwerp Major at a canter cemented the side as one of the strongest teams of Global Offensive, a series they followed up with a win at IEM Cologne in a thrilling grand final win over NAVI that would live long in the memory. However, the upset-ridden Rio Major turned out to be a calamitous affair for the squad as they wet out in joint-last place in the Legends stage and fell short of Heroic and G2 in the year-ending BLAST events.

A lack of motivation was clearly becoming the issue as the entire community was awaiting CS2 with bated breath, but the team did find the mojo needed to close out their Intel Grand Slam run in the end, clinching the title after winning ESL Pro League Season 17 in March 2023. Many more mediocre results followed, which made the turnaround after Counter-Strike 2’s launch all the more spectacular.

Aided by Karrigan’s leadership and ropz’s meticulous attention to detail, FaZe romped to a victory in the first three S-Tier Counter-Strike tournaments of the CS2 era (IEM Sydney 2023, Thunderpick World Championship 2023, and the CS Asia Championships 2023), and while they did fall short of Team Vitality in the BLAST Fall Final and the BLAST World Final to close out the year. After losing Twistzzz to free agency at the end of the previous year amid concerns about the GameSquare acquisition, frozen and Karrigan were reunited on the squad, and despite the fact that they lost to Team Spirit in IEM Katowice’s grand final in February  2024 as the primary victims to donk’s spectacular breakout performance, FaZe were still seen as one of the favorites heading into the inaugural CS2 Major in Copenhagen.

Despite an impressive playoff run that saw them dispatch Spirit and Vitality, FaZe suffered a shock defeat to Aleksib’s NAVI in the grand final, and, despite lifting the IEM Chengdu trophy a month later, Karrigan’s men never got close to lifting another trophy in 2024. They did, however, throw off all shackles at the other Major of the year, pulling off another monstrous playoff run in Shanghai by defeating Vitality and G2 for a date with donk’s Spirit, but they fell just short again on the largest stage of them all. Shortly after, ropz departed to Team Vitality, and EliGE was brought in as a questionable replacement.

Results continued to wane, with not even a grand final appearance in the first half of 2025, prompting a benching of broky and bringing back s1mple from the cold as a shock blockbuster loan move that Karrigan described as a “Hail Mary” play heading into the Austin Major. Though the team did make the playoffs on US soil, they went out with a whimper rather than a bang in the quarterfinals against The MongolZ.

Who was the team’s top-performing individual player in that match? Their 35-year-old in-game leader, Karrigan.

What is the future of Karrigan in Counter-Strike esports? How much does he have left in the tank?

Even for a player with as storied a career as Karrigan’s, the question inevitably crops up over and over again: Just how much motivation is left to climb the same heights again? Knowing the family drama swirling around the time of the Shanghai Major, and the team’s incredible run to the grand final, you could easily see a world where Karrigan might have hung up his mouse had he managed to triumph over donk’s Team Spirit to lift a second Major trophy.

Now, it feels like there’s still something left to prove – but concerningly, FaZe were far from title challengers in the first half of 2025, with the EliGe signing looking like a bit of a misfire and broky’s long-overdue replacement on the AWP marking the next step in the wilderness, with a quarterfinal exit at Austin marking their worst Major result in the CS2 era.

Still, players like Karrigan prove that there is a tangible benefit of veterancy and that the true possibilities in terms of esports longevity still haven’t been properly explored. Like Novak Djokovic in tennis, or Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton in Formula 1 – or Tom Brady and his many merry quarterbacking adventures – it is clear that athletes of all kinds can greatly extend the twilight of their careers, and if the wily Dane still has the hunger to compete with the kids, who’s to say he hasn’t got one more great lineup in him to put a Major-shaped cherry on top? Only time will tell.