Our sister site VPGAME sat down with Tarik “tarik” Celik at IEM Beijing following Evil Geniuses elimination.

EG was knocked out of the event by a strong looking FaZe Clan. The international mix handed the North American side both of their losses at the event in China.

tarik discussed the swap to EG from NRG, the Krieg, stanislaw, and more in the exclusive interview.

You can read the transcribed interview below.

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VPGAME: Were there any differences between playing under the Evil Geniuses banner rather than NRG?

tarik: I think there was a little bit of pressure because we switched organizations and we didn’t want to let them down. We wanted to make sure that we would do them right, especially since they made a big investment getting us into their organization and it’s also a very prestigious name in the Counter-Strike scene and history.







VPGAME: It’s not your first time to China – so which city do you prefer? You’ve been to Hong Kong, Beijing, and others…so which do you prefer?

tarik: Beijing is really nice, but I haven’t really got to explore too much. I know next week we’re going to Shanghai as well which I heard is really good so I’m looking forward to Shanghai.

Beijing has been really good, the fans are really nice and they show a lot of support to all of the teams which is really cool. Hopefully there are more events here because the fans are very passionate.







VPGAME: How does it feel to play alongside stanislaw again? Do you miss the classic OpTic?

tarik: Yeah, I mean we’ve had some pretty good results with bringing in stanislaw so I think everyone on the team is pretty happy with bringing him into the roster. I think we’re definitely clicking really well and the chemistry is good, but this event was a little bit of a disappointment with the way that we went out so we’re hoping that next week in Shanghai we can put up a much better performance.

We think we’re a team that can be doing much better than we did here so hopefully things improve moving forward.







VPGAME: Do you think the SG 553 is overpowered or unbalanced? Do you think there’s a way to balance it?

tarik: I think the common thing in the community right now is everyone is saying it’s a little overpowered and it probably is the case so maybe increasing the money on it would probably help.

In my opinion, it’s the meta right now so everyone has to adjust and everyone has an equal chance to use whatever is available. It’s not like only one team can use this gun, so everyone has the right to use it so you just have to adjust to the current meta and play with what you’re given.

It’s up to Valve, if they want to change it, they change it. They have all the statistics so they will decide.







VPGAME: What’s your schedule like coming up? Staying in China for Shanghai or traveling home?

tarik: Right after this event we’re gonna go back home. We talked about staying in China but we’re on the road so much that it’s really nice for us to be able to go home and stay with our family.

Otherwise, we would have probably just stayed here until next week. We’re going to fly from here back home and then to Shanghai next week and then we’ll be in Shanghai for a week. Then we’ll go back home and we have ECS, and then I think after ECS is EPL so Texas then Demark. The rest of the year is booked out as well, so we have Russia as well and I think we have three or four more events coming up.

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