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Ninjas in Pyjamas are without the player who called their game. The organization, known as NIP, announced that Snappi has stepped down from the active Counter-Strike 2 roster to make way for a new in-game leader, HLTV, the reference news site for the game, reported on Monday, August 31, 2026. The site describes the decision as a mutual agreement between the two sides.
It is a move to the bench, not a departure. HLTV's roster box keeps Snappi under NIP with the mention "benched", and lists four players around coach Xizt: sjuush, xKacpersky, stavn and n0te, the last of them a stand-in. The announcement names no successor.
HLTV reports of April 1, August 4 and August 31, 2026.
A team that has to replace its caller
The in-game leader, or IGL, is the player who decides a team's tactics during each round: where the five go, when they wait, when they change plan. It is the one position on a Counter-Strike team that shapes what the other four do, which is why a change there is rarely a like-for-like swap.
Snappi, who is 36, had held the position at NIP for over a year and a half. He took it over from alex at the start of 2025, HLTV recalls. alex now plays for Iberian Soul.
The wording of the announcement says what NIP wants next. Snappi steps aside so that a new in-game leader can come in. Monday's announcement sets the direction without a name, and HLTV noted that Snappi himself had not commented.
The remaining roster is short twice over. A team plays with five, and NIP list four. One of the four, n0te, was promoted from the organization's academy team on a temporary basis in June.
Related readTeam Vitality bench Humanoid and start FIESTA in LEC SummerA year and a half of results under Snappi
HLTV's report sums up the period in a few lines. The best result at a big event was a quarter-final at PGL Astana in 2025. Three titles came at smaller tournaments: Fragadelphia Las Vegas, HyperX Roman Imperium Cup VI and Stake Ranked Episode 2.
The second of those was won in March 2026, in the weeks when NIP were chasing an invitation to the IEM Cologne Major. HLTV reported at the time that the trophy had put the team back inside the invitation places. It did not hold. NIP lost to HEROIC at Stake Ranked Episode 1 in Barcelona on April 3 and missed the Major, the most important tournament of the first half of the year.
Two measures frame the stretch as a whole. Valve, the publisher of the game, keeps a ranking called the Valve Regional Standings, or VRS, which decides who is invited to tournaments. NIP stayed outside its top 20 for most of Snappi's time as leader, according to HLTV. The site also gives his individual figure: an average rating of 0.83 against opponents ranked in the top 20 over the period. The rating is HLTV's single number for a player's output.
The figures for the last three months, printed on the August 31 report, show where each of the five stood when the decision was announced.
HLTV, player boxes of the August 31, 2026 report. A map is one full game inside a series.
Five months of changes around him
Snappi leaves a lineup that had already been rebuilt around him. On April 1, 2026, HLTV listed NIP's five as Snappi, sjuush, cairne, xKacpersky and r1nkle. Two of those names, sjuush and xKacpersky, are still in the active roster.
Related readThe MongolZ bench DarkMeister and tikuak, leaving three active players| Date | Move | Effect on the five |
|---|---|---|
| April 1 | xKacpersky signed permanently from ENCE | A loan player becomes a fixture |
| April 15 | r1nkle benched, stavn signed | New primary AWPer |
| June 13 | cairne benched | Four active players |
| June 22 | n0te promoted temporarily | A stand-in completes the five |
| June 30 | NIP and ewjerkz part ways | A benched player leaves |
| August 31 | Snappi steps down | Four players, no in-game leader |
HLTV reports on the dates shown.
The April changes came in the days after the Cologne invitation was lost. NIP benched r1nkle and, the same day, signed stavn as its primary AWPer, the player who uses the game's most powerful sniper rifle. r1nkle has since left for good: G2 completed his signing on June 25, HLTV reported.
June brought the second wave. cairne was benched on June 13, after what HLTV called a disappointing season. Nine days later NIP announced the temporary promotion of n0te, a 20-year-old Belgian rifler, from Young Ninjas, its academy team. He had joined the academy from Nemesis in February and averaged a 1.18 rating there across the year, according to HLTV's report of June 22. With Young Ninjas he finished second at Betclic Clash 2026 and won United21 League Season 47 and CCT 2026 Contenders Europe Series 2, and the site placed him 50th in its Prospects ranking for June, a list of promising young players. NIP said the promotion was for the upcoming events, and told the site that he was signed up for XSE Pro League and Stake Ranked Episode 3. Ten weeks on, he is still listed as a stand-in.
The staff changed as well. THREAT left the organization on June 1. In an interview with HLTV on August 14, Snappi said that a member of staff had moved from analyst to assistant coach and that the team no longer had a dedicated sports psychologist.
What Snappi said two weeks earlier
That interview, given at the Esports World Cup in Paris, reads differently now. Snappi was speaking as the team's leader after a series win over BetBoom, and he described a side that was hard to predict, even from the inside.
Related readAstralis bench HooXi and jabbi days after a title in BarcelonaHis diagnosis was specific. NIP play well when a round goes to plan, he told HLTV, and hesitate in the middle of a round when the first plan fails. He said every player needed to feed small pieces of information to the others in those moments, and that the team had worked on exactly that before the BetBoom series.
He also pointed to the turnover. Frequent changes of personnel had hurt the team's ability to build consistency, he said, and what the team needed was stability. On the two newest players, he said stavn was still adapting to the sniper's role and praised n0te's mechanics while adding that the young rifler needed confidence.
He was most detailed about xKacpersky, the 19-year-old whose move from ENCE NIP made permanent in April. A Counter-Strike map is played in two halves, one attacking as the T side and one defending as the CT side. Snappi put xKacpersky's rating at about 1.20 on the first and about 1.00 on the second, and said he expected the gap to close as the player grew used to his new teammates.
His stated goal was the next Major. Snappi told HLTV he hoped NIP would qualify and go far there, because that result would decide what the following season looked like.
The Paris results that came before the decision
NIP played the Esports World Cup in mid-August. The team arrived ranked 28th in the site's world ranking of August 10.
It began with a defeat to Legacy, ranked 15th, in a best-of-one, a match played on a single map. NIP then beat BetBoom, ranked 12th, in a series HLTV summed up under a headline about xKacpersky's rating of 2.34. That win set up a match against Astralis on August 16 in the lower bracket of Group B, with a place in the playoffs for the winner.
Related readBetBoom field FL4MUS and zorte as stand-ins at three LAN eventsAstralis, ranked 11th, won it two maps to one. NIP lost Nuke 13-3, won Inferno 13-10 and lost the deciding map, Cache, 13-7 after trailing 6-1 in the first half, HLTV reported. A map is normally won by the first team to reach thirteen rounds.
The report of August 31 shows NIP 24th in HLTV's ranking. In Valve's standings, the ones that carry consequences, the last monthly update before the announcement was published on August 4. NIP were 27th in the world with 1,444 points. paiN were two points ahead in 26th place and DENDELE four points behind in 28th. BIG, in 21st, had 1,516, and HEROIC, the team that ended NIP's Cologne hopes in April, were 30th with 1,427. The top of the same table was led by Spirit with 2,011 points.
Nine weeks to the Singapore cut-off
The calendar explains why the timing matters. The second Major of the year is the PGL Singapore Major, scheduled from November 24 to December 13 with 32 teams and a prize pool of US$1.25 million. HLTV reported in April that PGL, the organizer, had set the invitation cut-off at November 2. From the announcement of August 31 to that date there are 63 days, or nine weeks.
Inside that window NIP have an in-game leader to name and a fifth place that n0te holds on a temporary basis. After the defeat to HEROIC on April 3, HLTV put the team nearly 50 points below the 17th place of the European standings, the threshold it needed then.
The tournaments that feed the standings are already on the calendar. The August VRS update is used to send invitations to FISSURE Playground 3 from September 7 to 13, Logitech G Play Connect from September 17 to 23, Stake Ranked Episode 4 from October 1 to 4, ESL Pro League Season 24 from October 3 to 11 and the Thunderpick World Championship from October 12 to 19, HLTV reported on August 4. Several of those invitations go to closed qualifiers, the preliminary rounds reserved for invited teams, and not to the main events.
HLTV's report of August 31 names no event at which NIP will next appear and no candidate for the vacant role. The organization has announced the vacancy before the name that fills it.
The name this team could hold, in the standings and everywhere else.
An example of the format. It does not mean the name is registered, used or endorsed by anyone named in this article.
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