Interview: Interview with mousesports Coach Sergey 'LMBT' Bezhanov 15.11.2016, 18:06

99Damage : You came to mousesports shortly after oskar. How did it all go down, how exactly did you become the coach of mousesports and how did the benching of oskar affect your role?

Sergey ' LMBT ' Bezhanov:



At some good morning their team manager messaged me and asked to join team for a bootcamp to discuss this matter and to see how we can work together. About Tommy (oskar), well, benching him affected the team a bit, but not my role, I have to do my job with the players I have and make the best out of it. Well when I lost my job, I instantly started searching for a new one. I messaged some organisations, including mouz, but they had a coach at the time, so I stayed calm and despite the fact that I had some offers, I was just waiting for the best opportunity, which was mouz.At some good morning their team manager messaged me and asked to join team for a bootcamp to discuss this matter and to see how we can work together. About Tommy (oskar), well, benching him affected the team a bit, but not my role, I have to do my job with the players I have and make the best out of it.

Describe a typical day as a CS:GO Coach, what is your day-to-day work?

I’m not a kid anymore so I have family and a daughter. I wake up about 8am, make breakfast for my girls. Then I just check my mails and gather all the information, results of the NA scene and things like that.



Around 12 o'clock I sit at the PC and I either start watching some Demos or create new strats, basically preparing for online matches or a normal pracc day. After that we are going through maps which usually takes like 1-2 hours, and then just start playing.

.@LMBT_CSGO uses modern tools to analyze opponents, find weak spots & construct appropriate strategies. Success is not a coincidence. pic.twitter.com/n9MJrg5rJK — mousesports (@mousesports) 9. November 2016



If you had to name one specific area the team needed the most work when you came in, what would it be?

Well when I joined mouz, we decided to start almost everything from scratch, keeping only the best things from the previous game style, but the first part was the map pool.

What do you think of the current coaching rules where you have four timeouts of 30 seconds each map instead of being able to talk all the time?

I’m not happy about it because I was calling full time in HellRaisers and I was happy about it. But at some point 4 timeouts with 30 seconds is enough to change the game phase or to change the game plan. The only problem which remains for young callers are the midround calls and exactly those are the most important part, so yeah... it would be cool if Valve at least allowed us to talk during freeze time as well.

If you had to outline the role of every player on the team in one or two sentences, how would you describe them?

Nothing special, in any team you have lurkers, snipers, and some kind of support players but nowadays you can’t have full support players. Everybody has to hit his shots, so at the moment I would say that NiKo is the Captain and caller, chrisJ - sniper of course and the other three guys are swappable into various roles when needed.

Having seen the team with oskar and with loWel after that, how did loWel change the team dynamic?

Well he is just younger and he wants to fight for every part of the map, for every pixel. At the start when he joined, there was some chaos in our game but then he adjusted to everything and now the team looks really good.

Including your previous teams, which players have been the easiest to work with?

S1mple, Styko, AdreN, Dosia, Ange1, Oskar.

With mousesports having nex and oskar under contract, could you imagine swapping players from the bench similar to how FaZe is handling their roster?

Maybe I can imagine this but at the moment I don’t want it to happen.

Your next big challenge is IEM Oakland. Your group consists of FaZe, SK, NiP, Heroic and C9. Needless to say, the group is incredibly stacked, but what teams are you most worried about and why?

I would say NiP and SK, cause they have really skilled players, really good reactions and decision making. The other teams are really good teams as well, but they are a bit more predictable and it’s a bit easier to build a game plan against those teams than against the two I mentioned first.

Looking further into the future, we have of course the Major Qualifier coming up, which will also be incredibly stacked. How are you as a team approaching this important qualifier?

At the moment we have a lot of tournaments where we are trying to find our best shape because we will have really short periods of time to prepare for it. So we are playing to win in tournaments, but we are still in the process of building our game and trying to find the best solutions for our game.

Sergey ' LMBT ' Bezhanov is mousesports new Coach. In our interview we talked about his role as a coach, his players as well as the preparation going into IEM Oakland 2016 and the upcoming ELEAGUE Major Offline Qualifier