Over the weekend, the HLTV Awards celebrated the best of the best in the Counter-Strike world from 2023.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, French superstar ZywOo was named the best player of 2023, but there's another award that we were more interested in: The Best Event of the Year award.
Nominated alongside IEM Cologne and IEM Katowice, the BLAST.tv Paris Major stood tall as one of the year's premium events, and we're proud to say it won.
The only Major of 2023 and the final Major in CS:GO history, the BLAST.tv Paris Major was always going to be one for the ages, but we'll never get over those arena walk-outs during the Champions Stage.
Over the course of that historic Champions Stage, 50,000 fans descended upon the Accor Arena, a new record for a crowd at a French esports event.
How about we take a look at some of the other stats for the event?
The event, which was won by Vitality in front of their home crowd, was memorable not just for the scale of its production or its broken records but also because of the quality of its matches.
A Major that saw the rise of tier-two teams that defied their tier one opponents at every corner, FaZe Clan fell to Into the Breach, Team Liquid to Apeks, NAVI to Monte, and, to complete their run from 0-2 down in the Challengers Stage all the way to the Grand Final, GamerLegion took down Heroic.
A truly unforgettable event.
BLAST ApS., Hauser Plads 1, 3., 1127 Copenhagen