Who do Chinese fans call NiKo a "Soft-legged Shrimp (软脚虾)"? Exploring Chinese player nicknames

2025 is panning out to be one of the greatest years in Asian Counter-Strike history with the MongolZ claiming Asia's first S-tier trophy at the Esports World Cup 2025 while the team were also finalists at the BLAST.tv Austin Major. Beyond the Mongolian superstars, squads like TYLOO, Lynn Vision, and Rare Atom have been posting great results at international LANs and demonstrating a renewed Chinese scene after years of stagnation.

As a result, western CS2 fans have been increasingly exposed to the Chinese esports community, their memes, and their in-jokes and have often been left wondering what it all means. Thanks to an excellent thread by on /u/Abject_Leader5124 by /r/GlobalOffensive we now know why Nikola "NiKo" Kovač is called a "Soft-legged Shrimp (软脚虾)" and Ilya "m0NESY" Osipov is sometimes called a "Sea Cucumber (海参)".

Here are some of the best examples from the thread.

NiKo the Soft-legged Shrimp (软脚虾)

According to /u/Abject_Leader5124, some members of the Chinese community have taken to calling Falcons superstar NiKo a Soft-legged Shrimp due to NiKo often collapsing under pressure or "choking" in high pressure situations. This term originated in the Cantonese dialect of Chinese used in Hong Kong and likens people who collapse under pressure to a freshly molted Shrimp, which are soft and often struggle to walk.

With NiKo already being compared to a shrimp, Chinese fans also came up with a new way to describe poor performances from NiKo, saying he is “Lying in the sand (卧沙)” i.e completely invisible on the server like a shrimp who has buried himself to hide from predators.

Some example of this meme in action on Chinese social media platforms bilibili and Douyin (essentially Chinese TikTok) often portray NiKo as a shrimp or a crab:

m0NESY Kid God (孩神) or Sea Cucumber (海参)?

m0NESY purportedly has two popular nicknames in the Chinese scene Kid God (孩神) and Sea Cucumber (海参). The first one is fairly self-explanatory as it is similar to how English-speaking fans call him "Baby Goat", it's simply a commentary on how m0NESY is a god-like player but still quite young, especially when he first started playing for G2.

As for calling m0NESY a Sea Cucumber, this requires a bit more explanation. As noted by an article on NetEase, it originally started as a meme directed at the Chinese National Football team, which has historically struggled to find success despite massive investment from the government.

According to the article, a player once told the press that the Chinese national team's captain told all his players to eat sea cucumber to "quickly replenish their energy." This absurd statement along with the team's poor performance led many in China to call the squad the "Chinese Sea Cucumber Team" ("中国海参队") seemingly as a means to mock them for playing poorly and focusing on the wrong things.

Anyways back to m0NESY, knowing that a sea cucumber is synonymous with failure in China, Chinese CS fans have taken to calling m0NESY a sea cucumber when he plays poorly, especially during his time on Falcons. To top it all off, Sea Cucumber (海参) sounds almost exactly like Kid God (孩神) in Chinese (hai shen vs. hai shen) which makes it even funnier to Chinese fans with homophones seemingly playing a big role in Chinese humor.

dev1ce's human limit (人类极限)

A final notable example is all of the nicknames for Astralis' Nicolai "dev1ce" Reedtz. Like western fans, Chinese fans have also taken to calling the AWPer "Tom Cruise" (阿汤哥) due to the resemblance between the actor and the player.

However, a more humorous and unique nickname comes from the streams of Chinese caster Liu "MachineWJQ" Yibo. During the peak years of Astralis' MachineWJQ and his fans called device the "Human Limit" (人类极限) because he was playing at such a high level that it was considered inhuman or the peak of human performance and mechanics.

On the other hand, now that dev1ce has started to decline in the latter years of his career the term has been flipped on its head to call dev1ce the "Humanoid Limit" (类人极限), meaning he is playing so bad you can't believe a human is behind the mouse and keyboard.

The original post by /u/Abject_Leader5124 has many more great examples, so be sure to give it a look if you want to learn more about Chinese CS memes and culture.