NiP started Group B with a comfortable Cobblestone win over SK, but ended up falling short in the Nuke match against Dignitas despite getting a 11-4 Terrorist side.



friberg gave us his thoughts on what organizers can do better

Earlier today they played Cache against NRG and barely clawed back into the match, which put them on a 2-1 record in Group B. HLTV.org got Adam "⁠friberg⁠" Friberg's thoughts on all matches, the EPICENTER elimination, and areas the tournament organizers can improve on.

I'd like to start with EPICENTER, where you got eliminated on round difference. How did you take the rough elimination?

I think we took it pretty okay, we talked about it afterwards. We didn't really lose any games, because we won one map and lost another map. Only when we played Na`Vi on Overpass we started thinking about rounds, we didn't think about the overall gameplan. All we thought about and talked about was "We need to win 12 rounds, otherwise we're out". And that really screwed us over a bit.

But I think we played pretty well there, the game against dignitas on Nuke, we should've won that one, but they have a really strong T side on Nuke as we noticed yesterday. And we had a pretty bad game against G2 on Cache, yet again we won the other maps, so I think we're decently okay with our performance there anyway.

Here at ESL Pro League you have a tough group, pretty even overall, how did you see your chances beforehand?

We have a pretty good chance of going through to the playoffs. There are three teams who go through from our group - even though we have very strong teams, I think all teams in our group can beat any team in a best-of-one - I still think we are able to go through. It was very nice beating SK in our first match yesterday and it was a very rough loss against dignitas yesterday. I don't know what really happened, we just couldn't get our CT side working at all. Then we had a close game now against NRG, so I think we're in a pretty good spot for tomorrow, we have Cloud9 and FaZe, so there's two games we have to win. Just gotta make sure we win those two games tomorrow.

I know you're always trying to get the organizers to improve, giving them as much feedback as possible, being NiP's representative in WESA, do you have anything in mind that the organizers could do better right now?

EPICENTER really took the players' feedback and put in the extra money needed to create an awesome event, because it really was by far the best event out of all events I've gone to. It was super good, you had practice areas 24/7, you had separate rooms at the venue. At the hotel where it was played we could just go from our practice room down to the conference room and played our official games. Everything that they did was super good, every tournament organizer has something to learn from them.

Considering how much we travel, and how much time we lose by just going from tournament to tournament, it's really important to have for example practice computers. Here we don't really have practice computers, it's hard to stay in shape, since we've been away for a week already. We did get some practice in in Moscow, because we went out a bit early, but I think that's something that's gonna be needed. When there are this many events, we really need the practice computers to be able to stay in shape and play good CS.