Kory "Semphis" Friesen is the AWPer and in-game leader for Team SoloMid and a fixture in North American Counter-Strike. His team has been in a slump lately, with no strong sign of recovery given their last place finish at iBUYPOWER Masters 2016.

Semphis spoke with theScore esports about the team's hurdles and their prospects going into the Americas Minor Championship, on Dec. 3-4.

You guys just played FaZe right now, what do you think went right? What do you think went wrong?

Not much went right. The pistols that we won, we got eco-ed. But then when we eco-ed them back, we then got re-eco-ed — we never got anything rolling. Usually when this team wins, it's a momentum thing where we win a bunch of rounds in a row. We get an economy and we start crushing the other team, because we do have talented players. But when we can't get anything going, it just depresses people.

I think people are more likely to perform on this team when they're doing well, as lame as that sounds; it just gives people confidence that they're not 2-8 or something. We're more ruthless when we're winning, we make way more quick decisions and we make the more-correct decisions together. But when we're losing sometimes one guy will go and the second guy is kinda hesitant to follow him, then the spacing is weird.

That's our biggest issue, when we're losing, we're very bad at getting out of the hole.

During an ECS press conference, TSM’s owner Andy "Reginald" Dinh mentioned that they would be doubling their budget for CS:GO. What exactly does this mean for you guys?

I don't know, that's the second time I've heard that, I don't really know, but it's probably a new year thing, after January.

RELATED: Reginald: TSM will double CS:GO budget in 2017

You guys looked to have an upward projection during the middle of 2016, but after losing Tim "autimatic" Ta to Cloud9 you haven’t seemed to get back on track. What’s holding the team back? What are you guys focusing on in order to improve?

We tried FNS [Pujan "FNS" Mehta] calling, then after about a month, we decided to go back to me calling, so it was kind of a wasted month. Even though we can keep some of the strats and some of the stuff we did, but everyone has their own style.

So that kinda set us back a lot. We changed a player, then we also changed our in-game leader and then we reverted back, so it was all kind of a mess. Then we switched me from an AWPer to being a rifler, Skyler [Skyler "Relyks" Weaver] tried AWPing and on top of that we screwed up a lot of strats on our team.

We had a lot of strats that were actually pretty good and when we run them in practice it's flawless, but when we play it in a match for some reason someone misses a smoke or a nade, or doesn't have a smoke for some reason.

It's hard to do everything correctly versus the best teams, it seems like, but whenever we play a lower team everything just goes smoothly and it just gets frustrating.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but when Nuke first came into the pool, that was your permaban, but a few months ago you switched your permaban to Overpass. Why make this change?

We always banned Overpass before, but then when Nuke came out we started playing Overpass a little bit, just because we haven't really practiced it. It was hard to find scrims at the start, when Nuke came out, so we couldn't even really play it.

When we started playing it more, that's when we went back to our Overpass ban, because we don't really like that map on our team. Then we started playing Nuke a lot and we've had decent results, but it's not really consistent for us. Either we win really big or we lose.

TSM’s American roster has yet to make an appearance at a Major, while in the Minor C9 and IMT are the favored teams. What do you think are your chances there?

After this event, not so great. But I mean, if we practice, fix the mistakes and increase our map pool a tiny bit more... We've been working on adding a lot of strats, but if we're not able to do them correctly, it doesn't matter how many strats you have, so it's all about making sure that everyone is on the same page.

I think there's a lot of confusion on this team, but whether that's my fault or a player's fault I'm not even entirely sure, because sometimes I feel like something is clear, when evidently it's not. Sometimes the little rounds, they add up.

Any final words for your fans?

Honestly, we've been going over stuff, a lot of server-side time and scrimming as much as we can. There's only so much scrims that you can get, so it's not like we're not trying to improve. We're trying, it just takes time.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Navneet Randhawa does stuff and things at theScore esports. You can follow her on Twitter.