mousesports became the first team to qualify for the PGL Major Krakow yesterday following wins against Tengri, GODSENT, and PENTA, with the last match going the distance on Cobblestone.

mousesports qualified for the Major on the back of ropz's massive performance against PENTA

We grabbed Robin "⁠ropz⁠" Kool for an interview about his team's journey to the Major, mousesports' confidence ahead of ESL One Cologne and upcoming preparation for the Major:

I'd like to go through your matches first, some of the details, starting off with the 16-1 win against Tengri. There's not really much to talk about aside from your Tec-9 buy after winning the pistol round. Can you explain what the thinking behind that is?

It's just the economy game. We tried it in practice a couple of times and it just worked, so we just felt confident in what we practiced and went with it.

Against GODSENT, how was that match from your point of view, especially the numerous wins in disadvantages, such as the 2v5 and 3v5?

Those 2v5's and 3v5's were unbelievable, that 2v5 we played, I went to A and I got the killed on znajder, I called for a save, but oskar still wanted to go for it. He went to B, I got a kill on B and he got two kills, then we had a 2v1 and I won it in the end. That was just really unexpected.

Was that what decided the match in the end, seeing as it got reasonably close in the end?

Those gave us the advantage, because GODSENT played really well, they had some really good strats. They outplayed us strategy-wise, I would say, but we just won those crucial rounds.

Going over to PENTA, you started off 0-9 down before coming back into the match, what were the problems on the CT side of Cobblestone and how did you claw back from them?

I think there were some communication issues and we just didn't realize what they were doing at the start. We just needed to start playing our own game, because in the first few rounds, they just went up mid and we had no clue they were there, they just did a lot of unexpected plays. We just started playing more loose and that worked for us.

Was there a key round that decided it towards the end, a play or a call, anything that you can remember?

Not really, we started out as a team and I had a really good game, I guess it was my best game so far in mouz, and it was the most important one also, so I'm really glad that we won.

There's such a story around you now, coming into the scene four months ago and now you're going to the Major, what is that like for you?

As I said before, some people asked me if I wanted to go to the Major as a viewer, so it's just really weird to go there as a player now. But it's a dream come true, I always wanted to play at a Major, I just didn't expect this at all.

What do you think about your old teammate, HS, making it there as well?

We don't talk that much outside of the game, we talked when we had a team, we wanted to make a comeback with OnlineBots but that didn't work out, some people decided to go their own way. But I'm really glad I'm not the only one from Estonia making it.

Now you have Cologne coming up in a couple of days, what is your confidence there going to be like after your performance here at the qualifier?

I'm pretty confident, we're going to play fnatic first, we're looking forward to that game. I wanna win one game against fnatic... Yeah, I feel good, we had a bootcamp where we played really well, and this tournament went how we expected, so we're confident.

Will you be able to find any time to practice after Cologne, ahead of the Major?

Yeah, we're most likely going to have a short bootcamp also between those two tournaments, it depends on the other players as well.

Is there anything that you can think of right now that you're going to work on, did you take anything away from this tournament or is it going to depend on Cologne?

Our biggest issue is communication, there's nothing I would really point out otherwise.