Kory "Semphis" Friesen is the AWPer for Team SoloMid and a fixture in North American Counter-Strike. His team recently went through a roster change just a week before attending Northern Arena Toronto, where the team finished in ninth-twelfth place.

On Day 1 of the event, Semphis spoke to theScore esports about the recent changes to the team and their place in the NA region.

How's your season going so far?

We're not really playing any leagues right now because we just got a new fifth in Skyler [Skyler "Relyks" Weaver]. We really haven't had much time to practice — like four days — so our preparation isn't super-high, but we're just gonna cut a little bit loose just for this tournament and then go hard after. There's just not enough you can do in four days really.

Is Relyks coming into the team as a one-to-one replacement for Timothy "autimatic" Ta or are you adjusting to his roles and positions?

Yeah, he already did most of the same stuff, right? So, on T side everything is the same, he pretty much fits in pretty easily. CT side he does a lot of stuff a little bit differently, so CT sides are a little bit different now.

Our T is easy, it's just more him getting used to playing with us than us getting used to playing with him. He's going in the same spots autimatic went and autimatic wasn't really part of many strats in general.

So yeah, I think it's just more like he might feel a little bit more out of place than we do.

Autimatic's had a lot of success on C9 so far (they're 14-0 in EPL). Do you feel that you lost a key part of the team?

It was a blow in terms of our chemistry and strats, we had a lot of stuff built over time, stuff people got used to. We got to play a lot with Skyler and introduce him into the team and I think we can be just as good, if not better because he's really talented.

We've always been a team that kind of went off of skill. So Skyler is just as skilled if not better than autimatic. I think autimatic knew more ‘nades and he was maybe a little slower and smarter, but I mean, we added more firepower basically, so as long as we don't try and get too stratted I think it's fine.

There's different playstyles in Counter-Strike. C9 right now is playing pretty loose themselves. They even said themselves they don't have a caller, so they're probably playing similar to how were were playing before autimatic left so he probably fits in really easily, being used to playing on the fly more, which I think is what the game is kind of evolving to.

You guys have a lot of young players in the lineup. Are nerves an issue at LANs?

I mean, that was something that I thought initially might have been a problem at our first LAN, but it doesn't seem to matter to them. Some people take a couple LANs to get confident in, but it didn't really seem to take them that long, so at this point I don't think it matters, but it was a concern at the start.

I told TSM, you have to give them two or three events. Kind of let them suck because if you do believe in them then you have to let them underperform. But they didn't under perform, so it's been good.

Going back a little bit, for the EPL Wild Card, do you feel you guys should have gotten that vote?

Yeah, I think it was kind of stupid, because at the time, we still had autimatic on the team. You could make an argument right now, since we changed a player, but at that point we beat Echo Fox [2-0] like a week or two ago like 16-9, 16-11 or something like that. We never really played Luminosity in an official match, but we probably could have beat them too at the time, so it seemed really annoying that it was a fan favorite vote.

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Do you think TSM leveraged enough of their media power to help you guys?

I mean, they tweeted every day. I already said this before, it doesn't matter how big your media coverage is if they're not actual Counter-Strike fans. You might have a League of Legends team or someone to click the link, but if they have to sign up and make an account for a team they don't follow they're not going to do that and I don't blame them for not doing it, because I wouldn't do it.

I might be a fan of a team, but if I had to go through four hoops to vote... I mean, you could make it say, "Oh, it's to stop bots." That's why there shouldn't be a vote in the first place, it's just a dumb system. Even with accounts, you can still fake votes. I'm not saying they did or anyone did, I'm just saying there's too many flaws to it.

Also, who cares who [receives the most votes]? It's about who's the best, so just have the four teams play each other. It takes an extra game to determine.

You guys are kind of in a weird spot where you’re on the rise but at the same time you're not in EPL. Where do you think you stand in the North American scene?

I thought before, right after ECS we were Top 3-ish, maybe on a bad day Top 5, but we pretty much had the Top 5 secure and we could beat anyone at any given day. We were always really good versus OpTic, they hated playing us, they even admitted that.

It's more teams like Liquid that are harder for us to play. Not that we can't beat them, it's just that they're much harder to kill and they make less mistakes. Sometimes you play so aggressive that you get caught in traps and stuff. That's something that we've been trying to fix and try to tighten up, but it'll take some months before we have the same sort of discipline that some of the more experienced players have, because we have younger players.

And then when we lost our fifth that kind of... I still think we're Top 5, I just don't think it's as absolute and we need a month or two. We made a lot of progress scrimming, but I don't feel that this team benefits a lot from server side time.

The best thing for my team is to just lose a scrim so I can be like, "look at why we're losing.” Whereas if I'm going to a server I don't know if players are paying attention. Not that they aren't paying attention I just think that if they can experience it, then they themselves can fix it, and their coach and me can help, and FNS [Pujan "FNS" Mehta] helps too.

Different teams have different learning styles. Like some teams can go on a server for three hours and they get better. I just think playing helps us a lot, personally.

So a lot of it is that mental game for you guys.

Winning a lot isn't always good, because if you're always winning, then you go into a match and then things start going wrong, you don't know how to react. “Do we force-buy on second round? Do we force up on this round? Should we have saved here?” But when you lose a lot, I'm not saying getting blown out, but you're just losing more scrims than you win, it helps you make less mistakes I think.

There's some rounds in Counter-Strike that make the game. If it's 12-12 and both your economies are even and losing the round has a reset, and someone just runs off and just dies and loses the round. Well that was a really important round, you shouldn't be making those mistakes. You should be losing that round because they did some sort of strat to beat you, not because you gave away a free kill.

There's always exceptions right, where someone got unlucky or sometimes an AWPer can just pick someone. But in general you don't want to give up free deaths on those rounds and I think that comes from losing or playing a lot of close games. When you're always winning you never think about it, you're just like, “Oh, I'll just run off and fight,” and then you get killed. It doesn't matter because you're winning so much that losing that random one round isn't that big of a deal.

That’s something that happened to Liquid a lot. They almost played too loose, they couldn’t bring it back and got kinda snowballed, but they seemed to have fixed that problem.

Yeah, they’re one of the better teams at playing cautious, like a lot of their players are hard to kill, like you can try really hard to hunt them down but Hiko [Spencer "Hiko" Martin], nitr0 [Nicholas "nitr0" Cannella] and EliGE [Jonathan "EliGE" Jablonowski] are really annoying to find.

I’d say that you and maybe OpTic were the two NA teams that really specialized on Cobble. What is it about that map for you guys?

I think it’s just really easy to win on T with no money. We could win with Deagles, P250s [as much as with] full buys. It’s really easy to not get picked, although people now are starting to play way more aggressive on that upper B platform with the stairs, so that’s been causing us some problems, but if we don’t get picked we’re really good on T-side Cobble.

That’s a trend in all the maps that we play, any T-side that we don’t get picked early on, we’ll be fine. Once we regroup and do whatever I say, a strat or just walk out, a simple thing or advanced, doesn’t matter, we’re usually pretty good. Most of our rounds come down to early damage or death that shouldn’t have happened.

Sometimes people do a good push and that’s not really a player’s fault, but a combination of a player making a mistake and then the next round someone pushing them, you can get in a big hole. That’s usually when we do badly.

Like a momentum thing.

Yeah, then we’ll go down 0-7 or something.

So when you get into that situation how do you claw back? Or is that still an issue?

It’s not as big of an issue in matches I don’t think. We just have to reset and that depends on what our money is, but usually we’ll just start running the our go-to strats. We just need to win like two rounds in a row and maybe SicK [Hunter "SicK" Mims] gets two entries or Twistzz [Russel "Twistzz" Van Dulken] clutch. We just need someone to come up big on those rounds and give people confidence, sometimes you just need someone to step up.

Counter-Strike is a team game, but if everyone’s doing bad, one person can help out and just win you one or two rounds and get everyone back in the game and I think that’s why like a lot of good teams have a lot of raw skill on it and you’ll see a lot of strat callers and weaker players getting replaced.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.