The Sentinels’ star is seemingly more excited with CS2 at the moment.
Although Tyson "TenZ" Ngo retired from CS:GO to switch to VALORANT in 2020 and has grown into one of the most popular stars of Riot Games' FPS, he's having more fun playing CS2 nowadays.
While TenZ was waiting to play a CS2 game in one of his recent livestreams, one of the viewers asked for his sincere opinion on CS2 vs VALORANT — and his answer left VALORANT fans surprised.
What makes CS2 better than VALORANT in TenZ's opinion?
"Honestly, I think CS2 is more fun for me personally," TenZ said. "I like the mechanical aspect in CS, and it felt like every single day you could get better at something mechanically, and that was a really appealing aspect of the game. And plus, there's so much cool s**t you can do with like, the smoke, so you get kind of creative sometimes.
On top of that, TenZ said that VALORANT does allow players to "unleash" more creativity depending on team compositions and characters, but at the end of the day, CS2 is "just fundamentally better" than VALORANT from a mechanical standpoint.
Ultimately, this is because TenZ feels he got killed by players running or jumping fewer times during his journey in CS:GO "than a singular VALORANT game" in his life.
Though TenZ is probably the most popular VALORANT player to ever say he prefers CS2, he's not alone in that boat. Former 100 Thieves star Spencer "Hiko" Martin, who also left CS:GO for VALORANT, said in 2023 that the Counter-Strike community is "just better" than VALORANT's.
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TenZ's career across both games
Although TenZ's opinion might have shocked VALORANT fans, he actually played CS:GO a lot before it became CS2. According to third-party website Steam Ladder, the Sentinels' star has played 9,654 hours of CS:GO and CS2 combined.
Many of these hours were in CS:GO, when TenZ was still an up-and-coming talent. He was a professional CS:GO player between January 2017 to March 2020, and most notably played for Cloud9 in 2019.
Although many peers recognized TenZ was mechanically gifted, he never accomplished in CS:GO what he accomplished in VALORANT. Once TenZ switched to VALORANT, he quickly became one of the best players in the world and saw Sentinels pay a hefty buyout to acquire him from Cloud9.
The 23-year-old player has also won two international tournaments in VALORANT — VCT Masters 2 Reykjavík in May 2021 and VCT Masters Madrid in March 2024 — on top of several regional championships. Although TenZ thinks CS2 is better than VALORANT in some aspects, it's highly unlikely he'll ever go pro in the game and abandon his current status in VALORANT.
