With Lukas "gla1ve" Rossander having just left to join Astralis, Heroic have had little practice time with their new fifth, Nikolaj "niko" Kristensen, as they head into ESWC 2016. After winning their opening match, Valdemar "valde" Bjørn Vangså spoke to BenjaCS of HLTV to discuss how the team did the best they could to prepare for the tournament under their current circumstances.

"We had a bootcamp for three days before this event," valde said. "Of course three days of bootcamp is not a lot but it's enough to get a decent map-pool. We played as much as we could, let’s see how far it gets us."

valde also spoke about gla1ve's departure from Heroic and reflected on how much he learned from him all the while acknowledging that he did not blame him for joining Astralis.

"I had been playing with gla1ve for almost half a year before the move. He was the one who gave me the chance back when we were Copenhagen Wolves," valde told HLTV. "I was basically an unknown player, I had almost never played official HLTV matches before. So, I've learned a lot from my time with him and I'll say that I owe him a lot. I fully understand and respect his decision to go to Astralis."

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Though gla1ve and valde seemed to share a strong bond, valde still had a lot of praise for Heroic's newest member, niko, and said he brought a lot of "firepower" to the team.

"niko is a really aim-based player so he brings a lot of firepower to the team and he’s also really good at communicating compared to other players at his age and experience level," he said. "That’s one of the reasons we brought him in. He was a stand-in at Copenhagen Wolves back when even I hadn't played with them so Snappi and I know him from previous experiences."

BenjaCS asked valde how he viewed his chances as Heroic made it through ESWC, given the presence of heavyweight teams like Epsilon eSports and Space Soldiers, to which valde said that his plan was to just take it game by game.

"In my opinion Space Soldiers, Epsilon, ALTERNATE aTTaX, and Gambit are some of the favorites," valde said. "Before this event, I would have said anything else but a grand final run would be disappointing with gla1ve but now that he’s gone and we have niko, we don’t have those expectations. We'll just take it game by game and hopefully we can reach the final anyway."

Olivia Da Silva is a news editor at theScore esports. She likes piña coladas, getting caught in the rain and dank no-scopes. You're eligible for free high fives if you follow her on Twitter.