Hi walle! You recently got back from Italy, how do feel after the loss against Pentagram in the final?



Hi, hi. It feels okay considering we didn't have a very good tournament overall and had to really fight in every game after the group play, with a little bit of bad luck we could have finished worse than second you know. We bought deagles to win in two games and succeded in winning those rounds so we are happy with a second place, but of course we wish we could have had a better final. On the other hand I think it proves more about us as a team when we turn so many matches around instead of crushing other teams, so I'm happy with our own fighting spirit.





Looking away from Pentagram's victory, you've just got to tell us about your magical 1on5 situation on Train!



Well.. The first two messed up, then I think I managed to time a guy in connection (the passage between the yard and the smaller bombsite on Train, author's note) and the other two did the classic "stick together" move, so since I managed to get up in tower (the sniper's nest overlooking the yard on Train, author's note) easily it was not a hard duel. It was great to get to have such a round, but we win and lose as a team.





Speaking of the final, you started out good with a 1-0 lead after Nuke, and you weren't that many rounds behind on Inferno. What went wrong on Train which is normally one of your strong maps?



I wouldn't say Train is one of our stronger maps – and in that case only our CT side. We can be satisfied with 3-6 rounds as T, but then we must get the CT pistol round, which we didn't get. Had we gotten the pistol round, it could have been an interesting game. :)

A couple of weeks ago Pentagram came out victorious at WSVG London after beating Finnish hoorai in the final. Despite this there weren't that many who expected Pentagram to be one of the teams in the WCG final. How come a team that's been doing just okay comes in and dominates two tournaments in a row?



I myself have warned team mates in different teams about Pentagram for several years because I've always felt that they are mad aimers and I think that it was just a matter of time before they would have a tournament as good as this one.

What do you think is Pentagram's strength, is it mainly individual skill or a good teamplay?



I think it's mainly individual skill but also them being fearless in important games and of course their huge will to win.

During WCG a couple of games were played up on stage. Audience, TV viewers, communication and climate – what was it like from a player's perspective?



The stage worked great, the computers felt better than in the tournament area and the cold was not a problem after having sat and warmed up for a while. The biggest downside with the stage was probably the reflections in the screen since we had a hell of a lot of lights above us, and also played in daylight – you didn't see a lot in the vents on Nuke I can tell you :)



We also had to use the ingame voice which we do very seldom, but it worked out very well apart from the fact that we have a couple of bots on the team who forget to use the button when they are talking sometimes.

During the course of the tournament a lot of the teams suffered from computer crashes. This led to very long pauses in some of your games. How did the long pauses affect the team, and what do you think about this happening several times at an event such as the WCG?



Luckily it didn't happen to us but EG's computer crash affected us in the round of sixteen. We had just won our first round and the score was 1-8 as T on Inferno and after a lot of ifs and buts they decided that that round would not count, and instead we'd play from 8-0. Luckily we won the round again and ended up 5-10. Then Pentagram had a crash in the final on Nuke from which we also suffered economically but we managed to win the map anyway, so it didn't matter.





But surely a computer crash can decide a game? A team that's really gotten their game going and is on fire and is hit by a computer crash can start to stumble, while the team that's down finds their game again.



Yes, of course it can. A computer crash can happen at very bad times, especially for a team playing CT – if the crash happens in the wrong round it might mean that you'll have to play 2 save rounds if lose the next round.





From a player's perspective to a spectator's: During the stage games WCG chose not to run HLTV. The official reason was that they had some sort of a deal, and because of it matches had to be watched via the WCG's webbstream which didn't work perfect. What's your take on this?



When I myself am not at an event I of course want to be able to watch HLTV and from my own experience the streams don't work perfectly and the commentators can be, quite frankly, retarded sometimes. I would no doubt prefer to have the option of choosing to watch HLTV and not having to listen to someone who thinks they know something about the game, and then those who want to listen to them can do that.

Looking at the entire tournament you mentioned in the beginning of the interview that you didn't think you had a very good tournament. What went wrong and what will you be doing so that it won't happen the next time?



We've been playing with the same tactics for about half a year and since we brought Abdi (SpawN) in we've been improvising a great deal as well. During the tournament we didn't have all that many tactics to fall back on if something went wrong, which it did in more than one game. We will probably start over from scratch with tactics and try to get them played in as well as possible so that we feel well prepared for coming tournaments.





Now that we're on the subject of tactics, what happened in the 5on1-situation on Dust2 when RobbaN was left against naSu?



I was the one who held the bomb and died first, the reason for that was that I was completely sure that I had seen him somewhere and thought that he couldn't just disappear so when I turned around he was there. I died, then another one of my teammates dies which left RobbaN as the one left alive closest to the bomb. Everyone on our team knows how to play the bomb so RobbaN simply waited until he heard him touch the bomb, but he didn't hear him do that, so there was probably some bug there because I didn't hear it either. Luckily we won the game anyway but it was a little sad for us to lose a 5on1 situation due to RobbaN not hearing the defuse sound when he was standing right below the bombspot.

On the subject of SpawN, who's filling in for HeatoN, according to a statement made earlier HeatoN was supposed to return to the team after KODE5 but that was obviously not the case. Truthfully now, on the question everyone is thinking about – when will HeatoN return to the starting five?



The reason for this is that the team that played WCG was simply the team that played the qualifier. Now, I haven't spoken to Emil myself so I don't know what his take on all of this is but it is very possible for him to return to the team for the coming events. Time will just have to show :). I miss him on the team, that's for sure!

There's been quite a bit of changes to the NiP five who represented the organisation during 2005. SpawN, RobbaN, Potti and HeatoN have all been stretching their legs in one way or another. When it comes to Potti last thing I heard he'd begun work at a club, so what's the deal – is this the end of the legend?



It's hard to say, comebacks have always been done in CS but if, when and how Potti will do that only he knows :).





Is he still regarded as a part of NiP? Does he play at all nowadays?



Potti will always be seen as a part of NiP. At the moment he is probably playing very little to nothing.





Should he decide to make a comeback, how would the rest of the team reply to that?



Right now it would be very hard for him to secure a spot in the starting five, that's for certain. :)

During WCG we learned that your previous CEO, Peter Hedlund, who had not been with the team for quite a while, had left the organization. What's happened?



The exact reason for him not being with NiP I don't know, but it's something between CISL (a company that owns, among other things, Gamers Paradise and NiP, author's note) and him and apparently there was something on which they could not agree and both parties decided that this was the best solution together.

During the WCG a new man in a suit was seen moving around NiP. Who is he?



His name i Andreas Waleij and he is a nice guy who played Half-Life in his younger days. During his more serious years he's been working within CISL and has now been given the task of managing NiP since Peter Hedlund left. He is a very ambitious and serious person and I hope that we can do something fun with NiP :).





I assume he's got basically the same duties as Peter Hedlund had in the team, but a little bit more specific – what does he do?



He is quite simply our boss. It is to him we turn with questions and it is from him that we get our assignments, and he will also work with sponsorship.





As it became known that Peter Hedlund left the post as CEO of course speculations immediately followed here at Fragbite about what would happen, and the speculations did not diminish when we could all see that you did not use NiP shirts, as you usually do. Can you clear this up for our dear readers?



We will stay in NiP, the fact that Peter left doesn't affect us as a team and we're still under CISL, just with a new CEO. The reason for us not using our NiP shirts is simple – you had to use WCG's shirts when you played and and unfortunately Sweden's "Team Leader" Rush got the ugliest looking ones he could find so we had to use WCG's own t-shirts.

You've been playing quite a bit of tournaments throughout the year. How do you manage to recharge your batteries over and over?



I, together with the others who do not live in Stockholm in the team, have been at home barely a month in total for a six month period, so it has been very hectic, but it is our job and we love to play CS :). It's starting to calm down now though but we will keep pushing until new year for the WSVG finals and CPL and hopefully get a well deserved vacation in January.





If you thought life as a professional gamer was just a game, you know better now! You usually train hard before events, sometimes you do well and sometimes you do bad. Don't you ever get fed up with success or lose the desire when you have no success?



It's very easy to get lazy after having won an event and think that you're better than you really are. However, you could say that we who have played in NiP the longest really have gone through the bad apples before we met success, so it really is like they say: the sweet aint as sweet without the sour.



I don't think it's very easy to get fed up with success and if you have a bad event individually or as a team you immediately want to do something about it the next time, and there's nothing that beats the feeling of winning an event, so it's worth working for :).





How long does it take for you and your team mates to get over a loss like the one in the WCG final against Pentagram? What triggers the most spark in you – a bad loss in a final or winning an event?



Just because we had such a tough tournament it wasn't very hard to get over and luckily I myself am a fairly decent loser so I can be happy for Pentagram, but it's completely personal so I can't speak for the others. You could say that there were good sides to losing as well, because now we know what we need to work on in the future.



However, of course I'd rather be completely blind to our shortcomings than lose, but that's the way CS works, you win matches and lose matches no matter which team you are.

Tomorrow you'll have a game to play that normally should have you very motivated – an online game against SK.swe in the second season of NGL One. What's it really like coming in to such a game so close to having played a major event like the WCG?



It's not that easy. You often don't play that much after an event so we'll all be a little cold, and the motivation isn't at a peak either, especially not if we're going to be playing from at home over the Internet. We would no doubt have preferred meeting them after having played together more on LAN, but that oppurtunity will probably come as well.





In my eyes the match between the two of you at the WCG qualifier at Playz in Stockholm was one of the best games ever played – both considering the quality of play and a spectator's point of view. What is it about your games that turn the heat up so much? There seems to be so much emotions involved. Tell us!



Well, I guess we have Marcus to thank for a lot of that and also Emil when he's playing :). We know what we can do when we have a possibility to get back into a game and we do everything we can to take it.

Yes, when it comes to motivating team members we must not forget about zet. We see him going game after game, someone not so well informed might very well think he was crazy. How important is it that he gets the team pumped up and gets the opponents off balance?



Marcus is not out to make enemies it's just a tactical move on his part and it's simply very frustrating to just play bad, but then to have someone from the opposing team point it out – it is very tough. Him getting the team pumped up has been very important in our success but how big of a factor him getting the opponents off balance versus getting the team pumped up is to our success, well, you'll have to ask our opponents :).

We've been doing this interview for quite some time now. I think and hope that we've covered most of it! Big thanks to you for taking your time, and good luck at the coming events! As usual, I'll let you finish the interview.



Thank you too. I'd like to thank everyone who cheers for us and a big thank you to those of you who cheer for us even when we're not performing at our best. Creds to the STGF boys.