Our CSGO player Markus 'Kjaerbye' Kjærbye took some time to answer a few questions on the departure of Aizy and Pimp as well as share his opinion on the new additions. He also gives some insight on what it is like to be the youngest player and discusses the team's recent run at the major and the CEVO. Here is what he had to say. A lot has happened in the past month, from the major to an almost complete squad overhaul. The team parted ways with Aizy and Pimp, what was the reaction of the team and how was the choice made to go for K0nfig and Rubino to replace them? Kjaebye: It was a bit sad letting go of Aizy, we played together for almost a year now and it came as a bit of a surprise for me actually. With that said, I'm looking forward to new experiences with Rubino and k0nfig as I think it's healthy to have a new start and it gives me some new motivation. We already planned on replacing Pimp with Rubino, because we knew he was a really good teamplayer which we needed. When Aizy suddenly left to G2 we knew that a really skilled and talented player was needed. K0nfig was the only player we discussed because we know what he is capable of doing.





You recently took a big step towards eSports by putting your education on hold. What made you go for that decision and was it a tough choice to make?



Kjaebye: It was a really hard decision but I already considered it at the end of last year. I agreed to finish that year and after that I knew it was gonna be a really busy year with a lot of events and it would simply make it too stressful and impossible to stay in school. Sometimes I'd have to be away for almost two weeks straight, so I just decided to try my best to improve this year to see how far I can go.



You have recently improved your performance by quite a bit, would you like to explain what you have been doing to improve? Kjaebye: I haven't done anything different apart from playing more and watching some demos of players who are good at holding similar positions on the maps and such. I'm still working on the one golden map I've had in the past tournaments which makes me look really bad, but I'm confident that it won't continue to happen in the future and I will be doing better with our new team.





As you are one of the youngest professional players (if not the youngest) in the CS scene, what kind of advice would you have for up coming players, both game and education wise?



Kjaebye: This is a question I get quite a lot, even though it's kind of simple, it's also complicated to answer. It also has something to do with luck to get picked up while you're still young because people have to believe in you in order to be granted a spot on their team. But it's really important to keep motivated and improve and don't get frustrated if you feel like you deserve a better team. You have to show some results on a team (which means you shouldn't just bail your team because you believe you are too good for them, but instead play with them until you have a good offer).

Going back to the Dreamhack major that happened at the end of October, what went wrong and what went right for the team? Kjaebye: We simply couldn't afford to set our expectations high going into the event as tenzki joined the team only a week earlier. We just agreed to do our best and hoped we could give both CLG and EnVyUs a fight. We got eliminated 16-14 by CLG, which was kind of heart breaking in a major, but as I said earlier we couldn't be disappointed as we hadn't really played with the new player at all.





After the early exit in the major the team went to play at the CEVO lan where you were considered underdogs but managed to overcome Team Liquid with a 2-0 win. What did the team do differentely compared to Dreamhack?



Kjaebye: I don't know if we did anything differently apart from having improved as a team, especially at communicating, which resulted in a victory against Team Liquid.





It was followed by a very close game against Virtus.Pro which ended in a 2-1 loss, but a very positive performance on De_Train, which everybody said would be an easy win for VP. You took VP to overtime and secured the win. What was it about train that the team used for their advantage and what went wrong on Inferno/Mirage?



Kjaebye: We have actually always been really good against Virtus.Pro and I believe we have won more frequently than lost to them. On Inferno we lost the gun round as ct which most likely decided the map. Suddenly they were ahead 14-7, even though we did managed to pull it back to 13-14 but they were the ones to close the map. On Mirage nothing wokred out for me and I just had a horrible game, which probably lost us the game.





The third game was up against the surprise G2 like team Conquest. The whole team seemed very frustrated throughout the whole match. What was it about Conquest that got under your skin?



Kjaebye: Conquest really surprised us, even though we didn't under estimate them. It felt like we played EnVyUs on Cobble, they just rushed and ran through every single smoke and hit every single shot which could be frustrating sometimes. We knew it would be an "easy" way to the final as we only would have had to beat mouz in the semi-finals, so we really didn't want to lose against Conquest, which sadly couldn't be avoided.





What are your hopes for the rest of the year and the upcoming year?



Kjaebye: I just hope we can stick together with this lineup now and really focus on practising. We need to learn from the mistakes we make ingame and just keep improving, while still having fun together. From my own point of view I would like to improve and become more consistent in the important games against the big teams.



