Where are they now: PashaBMW
The Russian rifler, a seven-time MVP who peaked in the online era with Virtus.pro and finally won on stage with Volna, has spent almost two years without a team, but insists that his playing career is not over.
A Flashpoint champion, the owner of four MVP medals in four consecutive events, and one of the few players to collect six of them before ever setting foot on a big LAN stage, few careers of the last decade have been as hard to categorize as that of Pavel "PashaBMW" Tishchenko.
Veterans remember him as the teenager who replaced AdreN in Virtus.pro in the spring of 2020 and won four titles in a row from a bootcamp. Tier-two regulars know him from four years of CCT and ESL Challenger League runs with Kometa and Volna. Newer fans may only know him from the Volna side that won YaLLa Compass in 2024, the biggest of his sixteen titles and the last big one before an absence that is now approaching two years.
His story begins in 2018 with Bimmer Gaming, a Russian tier-three team assembled by Kirill "kombat" Somov. The five spent a year and a half in CIS open qualifiers, winning a single online cup along the way, and PashaBMW, then 16, quickly became the player the rest of the team was built around.
"Pasha was always the best player in our team, from the first practice," says kombat, who left competitive Counter-Strike in 2020 and now works outside of esports. "We knew he would leave at some point. For a team like ours it was normal, the best player goes to a better team. We were only surprised how fast it happened."
The exit came in April 2020, when Heroic needed a fifth player for ESL One: Road to Rio. Two weeks and a 1.37 rating later, PashaBMW was signing for Virtus.pro, and by January he had three MVP medals, a spot in the HLTV Top 20 at 17th, and a reputation as one of the most dangerous online players in the world.
"2020 was a strange year to have your best year," PashaBMW reflects. "Everybody was at home, nobody knew when LANs would come back, and we were playing almost every week from the bootcamp. For me it was perfect, because I had a lot of time to practice. But I always had this feeling that something was missing, that people would say it doesn't count."
The Virtus.pro chapter ended in March 2021, six weeks after a fourth straight title at cs_summit 7. PashaBMW still does not elaborate on the exit, other than to say it was "a decision of the club" that he accepted.
What followed were almost four years in the tier-two scene that produced more silverware than headlines, broken up only by short stand-in spells with Spirit in 2021 and Cloud9 in 2024. With Kometa he won four titles, from IronWar in his first summer to CCT Central Europe Series 1, where he collected another MVP medal, and was named an EVP at three of the big CIS events of 2021. With Volna he added seven more titles, two more MVP medals, an EVP, and, in June 2024, the one thing his career had been missing: a LAN title.
YaLLa Compass 2024 in Abu Dhabi was his first big LAN, six years after his debut with Bimmer Gaming. He won it, was named MVP after a 1.55-rated tournament, and still names it as the best week of his career.
"When we won the final I didn't know what to do with my hands," he says. "I had played so many finals online, you win and you take off the headphones and you are in the same room. In Abu Dhabi there were thousands of people. I think about that moment a lot."
Six months later, Volna let him go. The organization's general manager, Askar Nurgaliyev, framed it as a move towards youth, and PashaBMW, then 22, started looking for a team at the worst possible moment of the calendar, with rosters locked for the start of the 2025 season.
He has been looking ever since. PashaBMW has kept playing on FACEIT, practiced with several mixes, and, according to people close to him, turned down offers from teams outside the top 50 that did not match what he was looking for. Volna, meanwhile, have not played an official match since his departure.
"I didn't stop," he says. "I play every day, I watch a lot of matches, and in the last months I started to practice with a team again. My aim is the same, maybe the game sense is even better, because I see the game from outside. What I need now is a real team and real matches."
Not everyone from his past is still in the game. Artem "SHAKAL" Zuev, the former Bimmer Gaming AWPer whose breakout PashaBMW predicted in our Top 20 series in 2021, never made it to a bigger team, and now coaches aspiring players online.
"Pasha always believed in me more than I believed in myself," SHAKAL says. "It didn't work out for me as a player, but I'm happy that at least one of us made it. I think he still has a lot to give."
Here is the full picture of PashaBMW's career on record, year by year:
PashaBMW| Year | Team (maps) | Rating 2.0 | ADR | KPR | DPR | Impact | KAST | Award |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 |  (59) | 1.22 | 89.3 | 0.82 | 0.64 | 1.39 | 74.8% | |
| 2020 |  (135) | 1.33 | 95.9 | 0.88 | 0.62 | 1.52 | 78.2% | 3× MVP |
| 2021 |  (119) | 1.32 | 95.0 | 0.86 | 0.60 | 1.48 | 77.7% | 1× MVP |
| 2022 | (124) | 1.33 | 96.5 | 0.88 | 0.61 | 1.52 | 77.0% | 1× MVP |
| 2023 |  (126) | 1.33 | 95.8 | 0.87 | 0.62 | 1.50 | 78.1% | 1× MVP |
| 2024 | (136) | 1.35 | 97.3 | 0.89 | 0.61 | 1.55 | 77.6% | 1× MVP |
As for a comeback, PashaBMW chooses his words carefully. Sources close to the player tell HLTV that at least three teams have made contact since the summer, though none of the talks are believed to be at an advanced stage, and the player himself will neither confirm nor deny anything.
"I can't say anything about teams," he says. "But I am ready. If the right project comes, I will be there."
Asked where he sees himself a year from now, PashaBMW does not hesitate.
"On stage. That's the only place I want to be."
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