donk: “They keep stealing my aces” — Spirit star shares playful solution

Danil “donk” Kryshkovets has spent the first half of StarLadder Budapest Major 2025 turning the stage into his personal highlight reel. Two clean aces in the first three days, a demolition job on Team Liquid, and a full–house with the AWP against FaZe have only reinforced his status as the game’s most terrifying rifler. 

At the same time, the 18-year-old Russian is trying to convince everyone – including himself – that he no longer cares about stat-padding or chasing aces. In a recent HLTV interview he stressed that he has “become more mature” and is now focused on “winning the game as a team, not as a star player”, adding that he doesn’t feel the need to kill “four, five” opponents every round anymore. 

That tension between unstoppable frag machine and self-proclaimed team-first player is exactly what made a short segment from Team Spirit’s Budapest Major vlog catch fire in the community. In the video – released on the organisation’s YouTube channel with English subtitles – donk laughs about how often his potential aces are “stolen” by team-mates cleaning up the final kill, and jokes about needing a solution inside the team so he can actually finish some of them. The moment plays into a meme that has followed him since his breakout year: no matter how many multi-kills he delivers, someone always seems to swipe the last frag at the end.

While the vlog sequence is clearly light-hearted, it also reflects a very real storyline around Spirit’s prodigy: how do you build a healthy team culture around a player who is constantly on for aces?

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Ace machine in Budapest

The Budapest Major has given plenty of fuel to the “stolen ace” narrative simply because donk is getting into those positions so often.

In Spirit’s opening match of Stage 3 against Team Liquid, the rifler produced one of the most talked-about maps of his career. Russian outlet Escorenews notes that he recorded his first ace of the tournament in that series, while Metaratings quotes the player himself saying he “knew [he] would start the Major with an ace” and just didn’t want to jinx it by saying it out loud beforehand. 

A day later, he did it again – this time with the big green. In the second stage-three match versus FaZe, donk picked up an AWP on Dust2 and wiped all five opponents in the 12th round, opening up the map and pushing Spirit firmly towards a 13-8 victory. Escorenews describes how he first removed a player on long before rotating into mid to close out the half with a flourish. That ace was his second of the event, confirming that his individual form at yet another Major is miles ahead of most of the field. 

Russian site Sports.ru summarised it bluntly in a recent round-up of Budapest storylines: “Donk is farming aces in Budapest.” 

With Spirit cruising through the 2-0 pool and sitting one best-of-three away from the playoffs, it’s no surprise that their media team chose to lean into the theme in their second tournament vlog – mixing travel footage, team-speak snippets and off-stage banter about donk’s never-ending highlight reel.

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The “stolen ace” meme

The idea that his team-mates “steal” his aces isn’t new. Clipped rounds from Faceit and officials where a support player swings out to trade the fifth kill have been circulating on social media all year, to the point where even Spirit’s own channels occasionally reference it in captions and hashtags. An Instagram reel from late 2025, for example, jokingly calls out a “random” who stole donk’s ace in a ranked game. 

It fits the wider community perception of Spirit’s superstar: an ultra-aggressive rifler who often barrels through four players by himself before someone else mops up the last one. Between his 1.70 rating at IEM Katowice 2024 – one of the most dominant LAN performances ever recorded – and a rookie year that included a Major trophy, a Major MVP, and multiple other MVP medals, many fans and analysts already consider him the best player in the world. 

Hally, Spirit’s head coach, half-joked about this aura in a long interview for Russian outlet Taverna.gg, explaining why it was so difficult to integrate fellow wunderkind kyousuke into the same system:

“From the moment the spotlight hit, there would have been issues. Dania literally takes everything around him. (…) The roles I promised Max were not Dania’s roles. I told him from the start: ‘You will not play donk’s positions.’” 

That line – “takes everything around him” – could just as easily describe Ace Number Four getting snatched away by a rotating team-mate.

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donk’s “solution”: change the mindset, not the crosshair

The Budapest vlog doesn’t lay out any formal in-server rulebook for aces; it shows a group of young players laughing about a very first-world Counter-Strike problem. But if you look at what donk has been saying in more formal interviews over the last months, a clearer “solution” emerges – and it has nothing to do with forcing team-mates to stop shooting.

In his sit-down with HLTV on the eve of Stage 3, the 18-year-old talked at length about changing the way he views his own impact:

“These past tournaments made me think that I have to do everything to make my team shine, my teammates, and now I have the mentality that I don’t really need to kill someone – kill four, five, something like this. (…) I just became more mature and now I’m thinking about winning the game as a team, not as a star player.” 

Earlier in the year, after picking up yet another MVP at BLAST Bounty Season 1 Finals, he told HLTV that he gets “really frustrated” when he plays badly, not because it hurts his numbers, but because it means “my guys should do more than they have to.” 

Taken together, those quotes paint a very different picture from the selfish ace-hunter some memes might suggest. For donk, the way to stop worrying about stolen aces is simple: stop caring about aces in the first place.

If anything, he seems increasingly happy when a team-mate finishes the job. The more multi-kill opportunities Spirit’s system creates, the easier it is for sh1ro, zweih or tN1R to shine too – and the more sustainable their success becomes.

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Spirit’s internal rules and a star surrounded by structure

Spirit as an organisation have put a lot of work into managing the environment around their young star. In the same Taverna.gg piece dissecting the three-hour “Vpiska” interview with the team, coach hally outlined several of the squad’s internal “rules”: no coffee within three hours of a match, no heavy meals shortly before games, a strict 8.5-hour sleep guideline, and a ban on bringing partners to tournaments except at designated “family events” like PGL Astana. The logic is straightforward – remove distractions and keep the focus on performance. 

Marketing director Konstantin Machaidze also spelled out just how important donk has become to the organisation’s business, saying that the CS2 roster now brings as much attention and revenue as the club’s famous Dota 2 team, and that several sponsorship deals simply wouldn’t exist without him.  OverDrive, the talent scout who first flagged him to Spirit’s academy staff, estimated that the buyout for their star rifler would start at around $6 million and could realistically go much higher. 

Those numbers underline why Spirit take both his performance and his public image so seriously – and why letting him lean into a harmless “stolen aces” bit in a vlog is smart content rather than a sign of ego.

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From “I knew I’d start with an ace” to “I don’t need four or five”

The contrast between donk’s killer instinct in the server and his down-to-earth public persona has become one of the defining storylines of Counter-Strike’s new era.

On one hand, he openly admits that he arrived in Budapest expecting to dominate: after Spirit’s first win at the Major he told Russian media, “I knew that I would start the Major with an ace”, explaining that he felt confident from the very first round but preferred not to say it out loud before the match. 

On the other, he repeatedly insists that the only thing that really matters to him is winning – even if that means someone else secures the fifth frag:

• On his 2024 season: he told Pley.gg he “didn’t do something special”, attributing his record-breaking rookie year to simply listening to his coach and in-game leader and working hard alongside his team. 

• On his current mindset: he tells HLTV he’s “more vocal” now, trying to make his team-mates comfortable in Spirit’s system rather than just creating space for himself. 

Seen through that lens, the “stolen ace” problem is less a tactical issue and more a running joke that shows how far he has come. A younger version of donk might have been genuinely annoyed when a team-mate denied him a chance at the scoreboard’s most coveted line. The 2025 version smiles for the camera, cracks a joke about needing a plan, and then walks into the server to drop another 30 anyway.

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More aces or more trophies?

As the Budapest Major heads into its playoff phase, Spirit are being talked about as one of the favourites not just because of donk’s aces, but because of the structure built around him – the disciplined AWP of sh1ro, the firepower additions of zweih and tN1R, and the strict performance culture that hally and the organisation have put in place. 

Whether or not his team-mates keep “stealing” the occasional ace almost doesn’t matter. What will define this event for donk is the same thing that defined Shanghai and the rest of his record-breaking 2024: does Spirit lift the trophy at the end?

If they do, there’s every chance another team-vlog will appear a few days later showing the young superstar joking about how he still can’t finish his aces – and how that might be the best problem in Counter-Strike to have.