OpTic have managed to get through the European Minor group stage unscathed, taking wins over PRIDE and Space Soldiers. After they finished their second games, we sat down with the team's in-game leader Adam "friberg" Friberg and talked about their first LAN outing.

The European mixture kicked of their Minor with a strong showing against PRIDE, taking down the Poles 16-3, and then pulled off a CT side comeback against Space Soldiers to go on to the playoffs.

friberg hasn't been sparing his teammates of criticism

Talking to HLTV.org, Adam "⁠friberg⁠" Friberg admitted that his side is pretty comfortable on most of the maps, and that he still has work to do in terms of his in-game leading.

Starting off against PRIDE here, the veto was kind of interesting considering it ended up on Nuke, which is a map that is rarely played, especially in BO1's and you as a team didn't have a lot of Nuke played either. Tell me a bit about the thinking there and your thoughts on Nuke for your team? We play almost every map and we have a strong map, we are strong on all of these six or seven maps that we play. We kind of want to play a map they don't feel as confident on. Especially here at the Minor, they would most likely try to get one of their favorite maps and we feel confident enough to play all of the maps that we play. For us, it's a lot about playing the maps that maybe they have not played as much. You got Nuke, in the end it was a pretty straightforward win. How did you see that match panning out from your perspective, do you think that they were caught off guard by the pick a lot? Yeah, we knew that they wanted to play Train and we knew that it was always going to be Nuke plus one more map in the last part, where we picked. We thought it could've also been Mirage or something, but they banned it. When it was Nuke, I was super confident, I know that me, Magisk and allu have played a lot of Nuke in our previous teams and we practiced a lot on how to communicate, which is one of the key points in playing Nuke, the rotations and everything. So I feel that we are really confident on Nuke, we have a good structure and know how to play the map as T as well. Tell me about the second map, against Space Soldiers. You ended the first half, the T side of Train with just four rounds, what were the issues there? I feel like we tried to play a bit too pick heavy, we should've used our utility a lot more. Train is one of those maps where, if they have a lot of utility, full buys with molotovs and everything, you have to pressure them so they waste a lot of utility, but then we also got picked off when we did that. It was a rough half, we just won one weapon round, but once again, as it always is for us, we will learn a lot from every game because we are such a new team. We have already talked about what we can do if, for example, we play Train here again, how we can change it up. We have a lot of other stuff. I think, for me, maybe the in-game leading wasn't top notch on Train, maybe I should've called differently, but it's also a new thing for me, being the in-game leader, I feel that I made a few mistakes and that we played badly as a team on the T side. Tell me then about the comeback on CT, what were the key rounds and decisions you made there to come back and win the game? When we played CT, we knew they like to pressure ivy a lot, so we tried to use two smokes there and make sure to pressure them back. From then on we were super confident on CT, we have played Train a lot, we have two super strong AWPers and Train is an AWP friendly map. I fell that after we lost the 1-on-1 clutch we knew that they had so low money, and if we win the next round, we probably win the game. And that is exactly what happened because we reset their money completely, they had one AK saved from the 1-on-1 and then 3500 or 3800 on the rest. It's a lot about economy when you play CS now, so we knew that they wouldn't have a lot of utility, that they would do something easy, we won that round and they were completely reset and had to eco. I just feel like our setups on Train, our rotations and everything was on point, and Magisk playing super strong inside, on B also helped. We have a lot of tips and tricks that we didn't even use on our CT side of Train as well. Train is one of those maps we feel comfortable on, but we still have things to work on the T side.

ImAPet and friberg have been working on the game plan for OpTic together