YEKINDAR - biography, career and interesting facts

The Latvian young star

Biography

NOTE: The player section is a bit outdated! Information could have changed! We will try to update the articles as soon as possible, thanks for understanding!

Mareks "YEKINDAR" Galinskis was born on 04.10.1999 in Latvia and has been active as a CS:GO professional since 2017. He started his career with the Russian team Elements Pro Gaming.

For a long time, the individually strong playing young star was competing in FPL and gained his first experience against top-players there. In an interview with HTLV, YEKINDAR spoke openly about his first weeks in the world's best league. While he was very shy and insecure at the beginning, especially tabseN encouraged him to fulfill his potential.

Mareks has always stood out for his aggressive style of play, which is one of the reasons why he acts as entryfragger for his current team Virtus.Pro . YEKINDAR's main role is Rifle, but he has also shown his abilities as a main/second AWP in the past. However, for as long as the Latvian plays in a team together with Jame, he won´t play the AWP that often.

While YEKINDAR has not yet posted anything on his Facebook page, he is relatively active on Twitter. On Instagram, he shows more insights about his private life. The 21-year-old (as of Dec. 2020) is also active on the livestreaming platform Twitch, where he often plays for his 40,000 followers.

YEKINDAR - Career

YEKINDAR started his career in 2017 with the Russian team Elements Pro Gaming and played there for about seven months before he was benched in June 2018. After four months without a team, the Ukrainian organization pro100 decided to sign Mareks.

Arguably the best lineup in his time at pro100 was along with NickelBack, dimasick, WorldEdit and wayLander. YEKINDAR thus got the chance to gain experience with some big names of the CIS region. His time with the Ukrainian organization was very successful. He spent almost two years and thus the majority of his career with the team.

Then in early 2020, the big breakthrough for YEKINDAR. While pro100 was in the process of disbanding, Virtus.Pro became aware of the young star after he defeated them 2-0 with pro100 at ESL One: Road to Rio and was also the stat leader for his team. At the Russian traditional organization he replaced Buster for the time being, who eventually returned to the active lineup as a replacement for AdreN.

YEKINDAR - Achievements

Due to his relatively young career, the talented player has not yet participated in a major tournament and has only played one S-Tier event. However, he finished this one great together with his team Virtus.Pro at the beginning of 2020. With a victory at Flashpoint 2 in the final match against OG, VP secured 500,000 USD in prize money and thus the best-endowed tournament of the year.

Besides the great success at Flashpoint, the team also won DreamHack Open December 2020 and IEM New York - CIS. YEKINDAR can look back on a great first year at the top of the world and has a great career ahead of him.