The only North American team at the tournament, CLG, are currently 2-2 in the Swiss system, waiting for their final group stage opponent to be drawn.



CLG were confident taking on Gambit on their best map

Shortly after their victory over Gambit, we talked to Ricardo "⁠Rickeh⁠" Mulholland who explained the thinking behind his tweet, what went wrong against HellRaisers and how he is adapting to CLG.

Let's talk about yesterday's match against HellRaisers. It seemed like you had nothing on the CT side, they got 14 rounds, talk to me a bit about that match, what went wrong for you there?

Against HellRaisers, we basically started really slow on the CT side, they got off to 7-0 or 8-0 start. We just took a little bit too long to figure it out, that our mid control was lacking. We talked about it afterwards and sorted our Mirage straight away, unfortunately it wasn't during the game—but I think that we now know what to do on CT side against teams like that.

Last night you released a tweet that got a lot of attention, can you tell me a bit about the mentality and the thinking behind that, what were you trying to accomplish there?

I was just sitting in the hotel room, bored, and I thought: I never tweeted something like this before so I might as well try it one time and see if it works. Luckily, it worked out in my favor.

Trying to raise your motivation, trying to fire up the team?

Yeah, I thought I'll come into this game… technically we had nothing to lose and everything to gain at the same time. So I thought, let's come in with a good mentality, basically.

The veto for this match, against Gambit, came to Cobblestone, and you left Overpass late in the veto as well. People were kind of surprised, seeing that are the two maps that Gambit play very well. What was the thinking there, did you have something prepared, something you knew would work against them?

I think it was a bit of a gamble, Overpass we believe is one of our best maps as well, yeah we left it in a bit late, I'm not sure how exactly, but I think we were confident to play their best maps because that are our best maps as well.

Talking about the match, how it went, in the beginning you struggled a bit, what caused those early struggles?

Again, I think we lost the pistol on CT and won the first gun round, but they brought it straight back and it broke our economy. So we just instilling in ourselves, you know, it's a T sided map so as long as we get 5-6 rounds we can still stage a comeback and we can still come back into the game. So we were still confident.



The second half had a lot of clutches on both halves, what do you think was the deciding moment that made you win in the end?

One of the really important clutches was when FNS was on A site, the "scream position", and was on red health. It was a 2v1 and one of our players died inside the site, but FNS played it really well to bring it to 14-9 or 15-9 because that was a really important round, our money would be really horrible if we lost that.

Going a back, you made the transfer from Renegades to CLG, can you tell me a bit about that period? You were a dedicated AWPer, and you came into a team with another AWPer, what was the thinking behind that, were you looking to play a more hybrid style, was it a better offer or something else?

In terms of CLG, in general I'm happy to take on different roles, not only to improve myself as a player, but also to help the team out and make sure everyone is comfortable. Still, if I want to play a specific position or I want to change something if I feel like I'm inconsistent somewhere, they will let me play somewhere else. But now that I spend the majority of the time rifling it is a big change to me.

You weren't looking to stop AWPing, it was just an opportunity you took?

I was still happy to be the main AWPer but Kenny (Kenneth "⁠koosta⁠" Suen) is a great player and I'm confident in him being the main AWPer. I can still pick up the AWP whenever I want, at the same time, I think I'm transitioning to different roles to make sure I'm a better player in the long run as well.

Professeur writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter.