Shao wins THESPIKE.GG MVP award of VCT 2022 Masters Copenhagen

Yesterday was the grand final of the VCT 2022 - Stage 2 - Masters Copenhagen, where FunPlus Phoenix faced Paper Rex in a thrilling best of 5 match going all the way. Ultimately, the champions of the tournament in Copenhagen was the EMEA team FPX, and the MVP by THESPIKE.GG award went to Andrey "Shao" Kiprsky!

Going all the way back to August 2020, Shao joined FPX alongside his current team mates Kirill "ANGE1" Karasiow, Pontus "Zyppan" Eek and Erik "d00mbr0s" Sandgren. After some few roster changes and not obtaining much in 2021, the team won VCT 2022 - EMEA - Stage 1 - Challengers - Main Event which meant that they qualified to the Masters Reykjavik held earlier this year. Unfortunately the team couldn't attend due to visa issues and was replaced with Team Liquid. After that, the team continued to show great performances and ended 2nd in VCT 2022 - EMEA - Stage 2 - Challengers - Main Event meaning a qualification to Masters Copenhagen. Last weekend they became the champions of this event after going through the whole group stage and playoffs stage making a Lower Bracket run after they suffered a defeat against Fnatic in the Quarter Final. A huge contribution to these successes was made by the 22-year-old Russian, who has shown great performances especially during the Playoffs stage. Before the start of the tournament in Denmark, Shao himself was unsure of his attendance due to the current conflict and problems with obtaining a visa.

In the end, Shao was able to fly with the rest of the team, but FPX was still missing Dmitry "SUYGETSU" Ilyushin due to similar problems, which meant that during the group stage and the first match of the playoffs, FPX had to find the help of Mathias "SEIDER" Seider instead of Suygetsu. After the loss against Fnatic in the quarter final, FPX were in a very difficult situation, as another loss meant dropping out of the competition. That's when SUYGETSU came to the rescue, finally getting a visa and showing up in Copenhagen to help his team already in the losers' bracket. Since then, FPX hasn't lost a single match as they won against Guild Esports, DRX, Fnatic, OpTic Gaming and Paper Rex in the grand final.

A huge role in all these 5 wins was played by Shao. While in the group stage, Ardiis played fantastically boosting a 1.27 rating and 256 ACS in 3 matches, Shao was pulling his strength as well as he had a 1.15 rating and 221 ACS. During the playoffs though Shao shined more when compared to his Latvian teammate, especially during the Lower Bracket Final against OpTiC and the Grand Final against Paper Rex. In both of these games, the 22-year-old had the highest rating from his team, with 1.25 and 1.28 respectively on 8 maps serving as a support role to the team playing between Sage, Sova, Fade and Omen. Shao had also great impact thanks to his many 1vX situations of which he faced 80 times during the event and won 20 (25%) of them putting him among the top of this statistic. At the end of the event, the Russian player averaged 1.12 rating and 219 ACS while using 6 different agents. The player that used more different agents throughout Masters Copenhagen was his Ukranian team-mate Ange1 with 7.

Photo Credit: Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games