Harley "dsn" Örwall is a Swedish Counter-Strike legend, having won over $750,000 in prize money for his teams, along with partner-in-crime cArn. The CPL Winter 2006 and IEM III Global Finals champion discussed his career in a lengthy interview which spans 2003-2011. dsn reflects on fnatic's relative inability to win the major titles, their epic run of 2009, 
Na`Vi's rise in 2010, the Poles's uncanny aptitude for winning majors, playing alongside f0rest/ Get_RiGhT/ Gux and his partnership with cArn in terms of both playing and tactics.
The early struggles and developments
During your early days with xPerience.se and Gamers.nu you and your teams seemed to struggle at the international events. What held you back at that time? Was there a specific development that was needed?
I think part of it was just due to experience. We were pretty decent in Sweden, but back then we were still not near the level of EYE or SK/NiP. We managed to play some good tournaments, like the Euskal CPL qualifier for example, where we came from the lower bracket and won two maps in the final.
At CPL, however, I think we just got overwhelmed with how big the tournament was, having watched all the big teams in HLTV before from home. If I remember correctly we just barely lost an overtime game on inferno versus Team 3D, so it wasn't all that bad (even though they might've not been the best team at that time). We felt that we could've done much better - we didn't play as well as we could've and that was probably due to a lack of experience for all of us, as well as the nervous feeling of playing our first major tournament.
Paint a picture of the dsn of that time period and his strengths and weaknesses.
We were not playing versus the best teams all the time back then. When we got to play SK or some other big team in a practice game, we all got really excited. So in a way, we were not really prepared for the stiff competition in the big tournaments. Personally, I learnt a lot from every tournament just watching teams play and I got better rapidly. I started playing on LAN in Gothenburg. When I eventually started to play online on Swedish servers and when we started to go to tournaments there was a bit of adjustment to be done to both the individual and the team aspects of CS. Our tactics were lacking, and skill wise I was far behind the best players. My strength back then was my AWP and my weaknesses were my rifles, work ethic and strategical thinking.CPL Winter 2004 was the first international breakout tournament for one of your teams and you personally got a lot of the spotlight for that performance. What had changed?
I think I played a little bit better at almost every new tournament. In Begrip, we had a good, confident group of players. We came a lot better prepared too, just from the better practice matches we managed to get. Back then the game was evolving a lot faster: in today's CS you don't really see a whole lot of things on the regular maps that you haven't thought of or seen before. Back then it was a totally different story, and that was also true for how you could evolve individually. I spent a lot more time working on my individual skills back then and I played a whole lot of Counter-Strike that year, more than I had done before.
It was a great tournament for us, and even though we fell short to NoA on dust2 to end fourth, I think we were satisfied with the outcome. Individually, I feel like that tournament was my breakthrough in terms of getting more attention for my individual skill.
If you were to describe your style of AWPing to someone who had never watched you play but had seen all the other top AWPers in history how would you use them as reference points to explain your style?
I have actually never thought of it that way, in terms of accuracy there were better players back then, like
cogu and 
fRoD, just to name two. I think my style was a little bit more aggressive, often looking for an early opening frag. As far as AWPers today, I think that’s how most of the good players play. Delpan is the best aggressive AWPer in my opinion and markeloff is probably the best at shutting down attacks from a stationary position. But they are not really like I am, my style is more old school, since I've been AWPing since I first started to play in a team.It's hard to teach an old dog to new tricks, meaning that it was hard for me to get that good, since I was used to being able to miss some and get away with it. If you do that today, you usually won't survive.
How significant was it for you in 2005 to beat
NiP at Rixhack with the skolpojkarna mix team?It was a obviously a great moment beating NiP. We, Skolpojkarna, won a LAN tournament in my home city, Gothenburg, a couple of months earlier called Optihack, where we managed to beat EYEBALLERS. Before Rixhack we joked a bit about the secret powers that the name brought us. It was the first time I was able to beat NiP, and even though they weren't really playing all that well in that tournament, it taught me some important things that would have an impact on my career: simple tactics can win you games and a cheerful atmosphere in the team will make the players perform a lot better.
Is there a player from one of your lineups pre-2006 who you can pinpoint as having had the potential to have a great career if he'd had the right opportunities but never did? Does anyone stand out in your mind?
I think Bullen was a great player and a really great guy. He could've played in any team, he was that good. He was really smart in situations, the first real clutch player I watched and thought: wow, he is really playing perfectly in the later part of a round. His distraction was other games, like World of Warcraft for example. I think he got fed up with Counter-Strike, perhaps due to the lack of real success. I think my breakthrough in terms of success was quite honestly the option in Fnatic to treat Counter-Strike like a job and that f0rest was just on fire for a long period of time.2006 - the beginning of the fnatic era
Prior to the fnatic lineup of 2006 you always played alongside team-mates who were a tier below the top Swedish players. Your later success seemed in part to be based on taking in players in that kind of range but picking the right ones who would go on to take the step up to being top tier players. Did you ever get any offers to join better teams? Was it ever a goal of yours to be in a team like an SK or an EYE? How good was your eye for spotting talent back when the 2006 fnatic lineup was formed?
I don't think I ever thought too much about getting an offer from either SK or EYE, they had solid lineups and were winning back then. In EYEBALLERS, the team I played in before Fnatic, I thought we had a good lineup, but it never really clicked for us and we didn't perform as well as we thought we should've. Fnatic was the perfect choice for forming a team, since we'd never played in a really good e-sport organization before, with resources to send us to the tournaments we wanted to attend. In Fnatic, we had that option.
As far as player recruitment goes, it was a good time for that since Begrip had a poor showing at CPL Winter 2005 considering their win at WEG some time prior to that. Also, Fnatic had a lot more to offer than Begrip. In regards to the players we chose, I had a really good grasp back then on how good these "talents" were. Tentpole and f0rest came from a WEG win that same year, and I don't think a lot of people would've even picked them to end up top 5 in that tournament. Just from playing a few mixes with f0rest I could tell that he was an outstanding player. The same goes for Tentpole. The risk was Archi, who didn't have a lot of experience. He did, however, play more than anybody back then and had insane aim. We went with our gut feeling there, picking an inexperienced and hungry player over some experienced player that lacked the same drive.
You played with fnatic in 2005 but the lineup was very different from the ones people will think of when they hear the fnatic name. XeqtR told me in an interview a few years ago that he'd had an offer to join fnatic with you and create a lineup for 2006, but that he'd chosen to stand by his friends, who owned NoA, and make a new team there. Before the 2006 lineup was set as cArn, f0rest, Tentpole, Archi and you how many different options were considered? What was the process of picking the players like?
For some reason Fnatic had a lot of trust in me - they listened to what I had to say. After our poor showing at CPL, they asked me what I thought about switching players and I, at that time, thought that was the best option if they wanted a Counter-Strike team that could compete for the top spots at tournaments. As far as players go, there were a lot of different options that we discussed (the management and I). I knew I wanted to have f0rest on the team, he wanted Tentpole since they had been playing together for a long time. I had to convince them to go with cArn over IsKall as IGL, and then convince cArn to come back to gaming (he took a break to work after EYEBALLERS). Archi we picked from playing with him a lot online. We could see his dedication and hard work; he played a lot and had great aim, we knew that he could push us to play more than our opponents.Due to fnatic winning the last big tournament of 2006, CPL Winter, it has coloured many's perceptions of 2006 and they think of that fnatic team as the best team of the year or in close contention for that title. In reality it's more reasonable to say that 2006 was the year your team took a step up to being contenders, placing in the top three at the big events, but that you didn't reach the status of being actual championship material until the end of the year. How do you see 2006 having played out?
I think we had a really good year and ended up among the top three in almost all the tournaments we attended, I guess we weren't good enough to win the big tournaments. we traveled a lot and we couldn't beat NiP for some reason, they had our number. Before the WSVG Finals in New York we lived together for one month and played more CS than I've ever done in my life. We only ended up third in that tournament, but I felt like we played really well. We screwed up big time in the game versus Team 3D on train where Volcano managed to ace us when the rest of his team were saving. At CPL Winter, one week-or-so later, we managed to get everything to work flawlessly and won the tournament without being taken into the deep waters. It was at CPL where we could reap the benefits of our month of living together and planning for those two events.
NiP were in kind of the reverse position in 2006: they won a lot of small and medium-sized events but were unable to make an impact on any of the majors aside from their WCG silver performance. They famously beat you practically every time out at domestic and medium-sized events that year. Were they inside your heads at all? What make them so difficult for you? Are there any similarities to be drawn with the way your fnatic teams of 2007 onwards seemingly always beat SK or the SK lineups with f0rest and GeT_RiGhT dominated the fnatic lineups of 2011?
I think part of it had to do with them being a legendary team, and after they had beaten us a couple of times it was like we got mentally screwed and almost had lost a game against them before we'd ever played it. They played really good versus us, because they knew how we played and could use that information better than we could to play more perfectly against them. They had a harder time doing the same to other top teams, though. For us, when we beat SK a lot with f0rest and GTR, we were beating all the top teams and winning a lot of events. The same goes for SK when they beat us 2011: they won a lot of tournaments. NiP 2006 seemed to struggle a bit with teams that looked easy "on paper". For example they got crushed by Alternate at ESWC, and lost early at both the WSVG Finals and CPL, but they always beat us, no matter what. At ESWC, Alternate played a beautiful game where they clearly had studied how NiP played on nuke and won due to a good game plan and great execution. For some reason, we could never do what Alternate could do to NiP that year.
2007 and beyond - the march to the top begins anew
What was the impact of Tentpole leaving fnatic at the end of 2006? It appeared that just when you'd reached the top your team was kind of reset going into the next year and had the teething problems of integrating a new player, ins, into the lineup. What were the differences and similarities between the two players? How do you remember that situation resolving itself and the year playing out?
Obviously losing Tentpole after CPL was a big thing for us, because he was a pivotal part of our team. He felt like he didn't enjoy life on the road as much as the rest of us. His wish to leave didn't come as a huge surprise, since we knew how he felt about all the traveling. Luckily for us we could pick up ins from NiP, since we all knew him quite well and knew that he would be perfect for filling Tentpole’s spot. Both of them were good team players, played with rifles and liked to be in clutch situations and win big rounds.
Losing a player who we'd played with for a year, and lived with for a month just to prepare for the last two tournaments we'd played, was obviously huge. We had to go back to the drawing board and use trial-and-error to figure out the best solutions for all the maps, which is time-consuming. A Tentpole position on let's say inferno, might've been a position that ins had never played. Luckily that year started of with a [Public Relations] tour to India and from there on we knew that we had a really good group of people - we had a lot of fun together and enjoyed playing.
As far as the adjustment, it took a bit longer than we had expected, but in the end of the year we managed to play pretty well. And it was a year when a lot of different teams won tournaments, if I remember correctly. It was back and forth.
Like in 2006, we ended up top three a lot.
In 2007 you seemed to step forwards in Tentpole's absence and establish yourself as the team's second star, after f0rest. Your rifles looked to have improved a lot in 2007 and you were more than just an AWPer. Had that development been on-going the whole time or was any of it in reaction to having to replace what had been lost with Tentpole's departure? Over the years it seemed like you personally always shaped your game to fit whatever hole the team had, so from being the second start in 2007 you stepped down in 2009 to become more of a backup/role player in 2009 when Gux and GeT_RiGhT came aboard, then with Gux leaving in 2010 you again asserted your play. How did that work from your perspective?
I think that you always try to develop yourself as a player, and in Fnatic I had the option to play in a few different roles over the years. To be honest, I felt more confident with rifles than with the AWP. For some time in Fnatic, we played without an AWP and that worked really well. My pistol skills also developed a lot during the Fnatic era due to playing a lot of pistol maps together with the team. So in a sense you could say I started as an AWP player and became a rifler, and I guess that's how our mentality in Fnatic was: we tried to make the team work to its highest potential at all times, and if that meant that I had to play with AWP or with rifles, as a backup player or as a fragger, it didn't really matter personally for me, as long as we did well as a team.In 2009 we had three really good fraggers, so I just tried to play solid and let the three youngsters take the frags. Some years, I had to try and play that role myself - it was all depending on how the lineup worked and what needed to be done. We always tried to figure out the best way to make the most of the players we had.
2009 - the great year
Thinking of the lineup you had during 2007 and 2008 what was the significance of the changes you made by bringing in Gux and GeT_RiGhT for 2009? Did you and cArn purposely design the team's style around those new players or was there an element of good fortune with the style evolving as you played? What did you think of the mTw team of 2008 and their success against you?
I think in 2007, part of our success was due to the social aspects in the team working very well. In 2008 that changed, it might've been because of bad results or maybe as a result of being fed up with each other. At the end of 2008 we just couldn't play well anymore, it was like we had lost all our confidence as a group, and that was huge. We got to a point where all of us knew that something had to be changed to try to maintain the high expectations we had for ourselves.
In 2009, we got two players who were different from what we've had before. Both GeT_RiGhT and Gux were, at that time, hungry and extremely skilled. They are still very skilled today, but in 2009 I think they stood out because their skill advantage was higher back then than it is now. Our style of play was tailored to our new players and in the end we went for a style with very simple tactics, but with more teamplay. It could be as simple as four guys moving towards an area and when they got to the pre-decided spot, they asked for a flash and then it was just full speed all the way to the bombsite and until the round was over.
I think mTw was so successful due to a really good mix of everything: they had really good tactics, seemed to have good spirit in the team, a good AWPer, a good leader, good fraggers and good teamplay. A lot of times when we faced them we just felt really outplayed, and that is probably the best compliment that I can give them. It was kind of rare to get schooled in finals, but they schooled us in both the KODE5 and ESWC Masters finals.
As far as our own play in 2009, it was really thought through. We knew our edge would lie in the individual skills of our players, not in the slow-paced, flash flash and go game. That works for some teams, and sure it would have probably worked decently for us too, but we believed, and also concluded after some testing, that we would get the most out of the team by playing simply. And simple could be really simple and repetitive. We got to a point where we kind of went against the whole trend of deceptive play. We just ran the same tactic over and over and tried to keep the whole team attacking towards the same spot on the map. We could basically do the same thing for eight rounds, and when we knew that the team we faced were thinking we were going to do the same thing again, we changed something up. That could be doing the same thing towards a different spot on the map or just waiting 45 seconds, or some other deceptive little thing that we just came up with on the fly.
2010 - from Gux to threat and back again
When you were using THREAT for the first half of 2010, he later told me, you were using most of the same strategies and styles of play as the Gux lineup from 2009. He said he felt like being a backup rifler didn't suit him so well, since his strength was calling strategies and his skills didn't compare favourably to Gux's. From an outsider's point of view it looked like your loss to Na`Vi at ESWC was what sparked your decision to remove him and bring Gux back. How do you explain that period of the team's history?
I think threat is a great player, but when you are replacing Gux you obviously have your work cut out for you. Threat brought a lot to the table tactics-wise, but we missed somebody who could get a lot of frags. I think we did well, we ended up second at both IEM Europe and the IEM World Finals and won Arbalet in Stockholm and WEM 2009 in Hangzhou. I think our problem was that we had too high expectations for ourselves. After 2009 we expected that we could basically win every tournament and that has never been the case for a long period of time for any team in CS. Our expectations paired with the loss to NaVi at ESWC got us thinking, and we thought that the best way to start winning again was to bring back the lineup from the previous year.
By the end of the year, however, it was pretty obvious that we had grown apart as a team. Losses were harder to forget and the whole atmosphere just got melancholic. We weren't working for each other as we did before and that, combined with the poor results and some internal tensions, meant the end of that lineup.
How did your style change when you reintroduced Gux to the lineup in 2010? Did you return to the approach of 2009 at all? What is your opinion on the play of Gux in fnatic? In fnatic 2009 he been a solid third star but when he'd joined SK he seemed to become a fully-fledged star player.
I think our style had changed a lot: we didn't really try to play the same style that was so successful for us in 2009. Or maybe we tried, but it didn't work. The metagame had changed and it was just not the right thing for winning anymore. So we tried to play more conventionally, more straight up, with slow rounds and focus on solid team play. Right away I could tell that our wins came a lot harder than in 2009. Bringing Gux in was obviously not going to make us magically unbeatable or anything. We won the first two-or-so tournaments, but we worked really hard and played a lot. In a way I think that winning a lot makes you kind of fed up, it's hard to be as good with a team after a year as you were in the beginning when the team was new and you started to win.As far as Gux, I think his style of play has always been really important for the team he's played in. In SK, he basically won matches on his own. In Fnatic, he had f0rest and GTR that fragged a lot too. Maybe that's why he didn't look as monsterous in Fnatic, when in fact, he probably was. He has insanely quick reflexes.
cArn - leader, friend and team-mate
There have been a number of stories related from former team-mates of yours that you've played a significant role in helping cArn call the strats for fnatic over the years, even designing some of them yourself. At times in-game cArn would make a call but then you'd suggest something different be done and he would often trust your input. How would you describe this partnership aspect of fnatic and the process by which you came up with new strategies by committee?
We all had input on tactics when we were trying to come up with new ones. It was a creative process where we encouraged each player to have opinions. One of us came with a suggestion for a round and then one of us would go "What if we did x instead of y?". We then proceeded to test some different variations of the tactic in practice. There could be really small differences between our ideas, but for some reason one would seem to work a lot better versus the majority of teams.
As far as calling, I was always kind of vocal with what I thought that we should do in-game, discussing things with Patrik in freeze time. I guess it brought both good and bad effects, but that was how we had always done it. Sometimes we could have completely opposite opinons on things, and in those situations, Patrik had the last word. I just think that overall, if done well, it's good to have discussion, even during games, because you see a lot of different things because you are playing at different positions. What I know about the player covering alley on train, that I'm facing most rounds, Patrik will have no idea about if he's not pushing towards the same spot.
Where does cArn rank amongst the greatest in-game leaders of all time? The case could be made that the likes of ave, gob b and Zeus at their peaks were all known their excellence in areas like preparation, anti-stratting and reading of opponents during games, yet cArn's most successful period was when fnatic was using very simple strategies without a lot of variation. He has proven himself to be a great motivator and vocal leader but does he belong in the same category as those names when it comes to the tactical aspect?
I think that's impossible for me to answer without having played with those guys. It's easy to say that all those players you mentioned are great tacticians, but so is cArn. For one year, we played a very simple all-in style with small adjustments, and yet we won almost every tournament we played. On paper, it must be the easiest style to anti-strat, still I don't feel that teams figured out how. So, to get back to your question: I honestly don't know who the best IGL is. I can only say that I think cArn did an amazing job in Fnatic and that he's fantastic both as a team motivator and as a tactician.f0rest and GeT_RiGhT
You've got a lot of experience playing with f0rest and GeT_RiGhT, having five years with one and two with the other under your belt. Describe them both as players, what are their strengths and what are the differences between them? Did facing them in SK, as opposed to playing alongside them, alter your perception of them as players at all?
I think f0rest is a raw gaming talent, he could probably be pretty good at any game he wanted to play seriously. To me, he's the ultimate player, although I haven't watched a lot of CS lately, so it might be possible that he's not the player that he once was. He’s a great team player and exceptionally good with every weapon except the AWP, although he's still good with that too. He has a really calm and smooth playing style and almost never seems to get stressed out.
I think GTR has worked really hard to be where he is at right now. He's probably not got the same gaming talent as f0rest, but he's a hard worker and he's very creative and will play a lot to be in a good shape. He's a very defensive player, that's how I would describe him at least, and he likes the clutch situations where he can show off his bag of tricks when it comes to sneaky positions. Like f0rest, he is also exceptional with all the guns except the AWP.I didn't change my opinion of them as players just from facing SK the last year of my career. I knew they were both good players and that it would be really hard to beat them. I obviously wanted to beat them, because of how things ended with Fnatic and everything, but CS is an honest game where the better team usually wins, and that happened to be them 2011.
Other great teams - Na`Vi and PGS/FX/ESC
After winning WEM 2009 and finishing narrowly runnersup at the IEM IV European Finals many expected fnatic would win the IEM IV World Championships, including you I would assume. Instead that marked the beginning of the
Na`Vi era and in 2011 cArn suggested in an interview that Na`Vi had been underhanded by gaining from practice with fnatic prior to that event but then refusing to practice against you afterwards, so you could not gain a similar advantage in return. What is your perspective on that first event and Na`Vi's level that whole year? In interviews that year fnatic players often suggested they might be better than Na`Vi, did you ever feel that?I think they were smart prior to the IEM finals, mostly because they were not considered to be any threat for top three at the tournament. Thus, I think most teams used their whole catelogue of tactics in practice against them. I think they were much better at using that information to their advantage, because I can't remember that we took any notes on NaVi prior to that event. They were also able to transform all that information to something positive in terms of reading the game, which is not always easy to do. I feel that they had our tendencies nailed spot on. That, combined with great individual performances, was just too tough for us to overcome.
I don't think I thought about us being the best team, because for me Na'Vi was the team to beat that year. Sure, we got our boost when we switched Threat for Gux, and won GameGune in Spain and the IEM tournament in Shanghai, but we weren't able to continue that run, while NaVi managed to play more solidly and put up great results all year long.
What strengths allowed Na`Vi to dominate 2010? Are they the greatest team of all time?
I think they won so much because they played more than other teams, they wanted to be the best, they had that drive. Sure, they obviously had great players, but as with most players, I think their skill advantage came from a huge dedication to the game. As a team during that year, they had an almost perfect composition of players: a good team leader, a great AWPer and skilled riflers. In my opinion, there is still a gap between Na'Vi and the best team of all time in my opinion, Poland’s finest.What weaknesses did Na`Vi show in 2010 or since?
I think a lot of games between the best teams in the world were decided by individual performances, at least in the end of my career when teams were careful about showing their tactics in practice. If all your players were on form, you could beat any team, but you could also lose if you were not playing your best. I think consistency was the key to success, and Na'Vi, with their heavy practice routines, were the most consistent team.
I think the thing they had a ton of in 2010 is their weakness now - motivation. It's easy to be motivated when you are just starting to win tournaments, but a lot harder when you've had a great year. From what I've noticed, Na'Vi doesn't seem to practice as much as they once did, and thus, a part of the edge they once had over teams is gone. It’s basically what has happened to all good teams.
Back when you were first getting established competitively in 2003 you saw SK's legendary run and no doubt heard many say for the years following that we'd never see any teams dominate again, that the era when that was possible had past. Instead we saw three of the most dominant teams of all time run through three consecutive years in mTw of 2008, fnatic of 2009 and Na`Vi of 2010. What changed in CS to allow teams to dominate so frequently?
I think what happened was that suddenly e-sport organizations had more money and better sponsors, and therefore it was easier to get better players to come play for your team for an extended period of time. Before 2006, there were only very few teams that had the option to travel to every tournament and give their players a chance to live playing CS. Also, at the beginning of a year, teams usually had new constellations of players, often very motivated to prove themselves.
You've played against NEO and TaZ going back 8 years, and they've faced you in some of the biggest tournaments ever. With all the different teams, types of lineups people have tried over the years and styles of play which have been developed what do you think it is about the Poles that has let them win so many of the major tournaments, even if they haven't been the best team in the world or of the year throughout most of their careers?
I think they have always had a good group of players, although not good enough to win every tournament they attended. For some reason, they have, up until this point, managed to play well in the big ones, so they are sitting on a lot of "grand slam" gold medals from ESWC, WCG and IEM Finals. Neo has obviously been huge for them, but the other players have bursts of greatness in them too. Recently, I've been very impressed with how TaZ and pasha have been playing. A while back, I was very impressed with Kuben and Loord. Needless to say, Neo has always been impressive and he's truly one of a kind. For players that have had very long careers, I think they get that extra excitement needed from the big ones to perform on top.The Poles are famous for being inconsistent in general but dominant in terms of winning lots of the major titles. Your fnatic teams, for the most part, were the opposite: winning lots of the small and medium events, being consistently a top three team and yet quite rarely winning the major tournaments. Aside from your CPL Winter 2006 and IEM III Global Finals wins you seemingly always lost out in the semi-finals or finals of the majors. Reflecting now do you have regrets about that aspect of your career? Is that a legitimate knock on you, cArn and f0rest, as the core of those lineups for five years, when it comes to ranking the great teams, that you didn't win more majors?
Yeah, I think it's a valid argument against our success throughout the years. However, considering tournaments with good teams (in some cases, better than in the majors), we've done really well. And sure, WCG is big, but the tournament has been horrible the two times I've attended, and in terms of the teams attending, it's usually got a lot of good teams missing due to the format of the tournament, i.e. one team from each country qualifying (or at least, that's how it used to be).
But sure, I feel we should've won WCG 2009, just considering the shape we were in that year. It was a big disappointment, I would lie if I told you otherwise. We just didn't play very well in the final, and personally I felt I could've played a lot better. It was just a bad day, at the wrong time. All the credit goes to the Polish guys though, who came out on top after playing great.
The fnatic 2010 split
Take us back to the end of 2010 when the fnatic lineup was fracturing, leading to f0rest and GeT_RiGhT eventually joining SK. The story has since been revealed that GeT_RiGhT, f0rest and Gux banded together and told fnatic they wanted to remove you from the lineup, then when cArn wouldn't go along with it they wanted him removed also, RobbaN and allen being cited as the replacements. What was your reaction to that plan?
It was not a fun thing to hear, but after Dreamhack Winter, where we didn't perform well, I had kind of accepted "my fate". That was when they suddenly wanted to remove cArn too, which initially wasn’t part on the plan, or at least I hadn't heard anybody mention that before. After that, cArn and I teamed up and still wanted to play and Fnatic eventually wanted the two of us to stay, which meant that the three of them had to go.
There were basically three options for fnatic after that ultimatum:
i) remove you
ii) remove you and cArn
iii) let f0rest, GeT_RiGhT and Gux leave the team
fnatic chose the third option and the reasons have been fairly well explained in terms of you and cArn considering yourselves the core members and being capable of recruiting new stars to form a new team. Looking back now though, with the benefit of hindsight, you retired two thirds of the way into the year and cArn followed suit in March of the next year, so looking at it purely from a viewpoint of retaining the most value wouldn't the first or second option have been better for fnatic, since they could have retained irreplacable stars like f0rest and GeT_RiGhT right through until today?
Sure, they would've kept the star players if they had gone the other route, but obviously we were fighting for ourselves in this matter, meaning that we were presenting some solid arguments for why they should keep us. Some of my motivation in the beginning came from beating f0rest and GeT_RiGhT, just to prove to them that I could still play on a high level. I think a lot of the arguments about the lineup boiled down to social aspects, not purely issues with individual performances. And yeah, right now both SK and Fnatic have good lineups in CS, but I think Fnatic are happy without a team with expensive stars right now anyway, since I'm pretty sure they want to spend more money on the bigger games right now, like SC2 and LoL.
When the split occured did you genuinely believe you and cArn could build a lineup of the same calibre with new players? Were your expectations for success lowered at all? Aside from the IEM V European Championship victory the rest of your time in fnatic was marked by placings in the 5th-8th range, so how did the reality match up with your expectations coming into the year?
I thought we would do really well and maybe it was a bit unrealistic to have such high expectations. After IEM Europe, where we won, things obviously didn't go our way. But for f0rest and GTR, they started to win when they got Delpan, so it was not like they were winning before that either. The break for them was Delpan joining. I think my motivation went down, probably because it felt like we didn't have that good of a team like before and since I had won almost everything there was to win, it was hard to keep the same motivation, even though I wanted to. I see 2011 as a big failure. I didn't accomplish what I set out to.The end
Being as your CS career has come to an end how would you like fans to remember you in the years to come?
I hope I will be remembered as a pretty solid AWPer who put the team first and had fun, won tournaments and played with the best mates possible. I truly enjoyed the time I had playing and I want to thank all of our supporters for making my years in gaming such a pleasant experience.
The final words belong to you.
I would like to thank all our fans, the sponsors I've worked with throughout the years and obviously my mates for all the fun times we had. Also, a big thanks to Fnatic and Sam and Anne for giving me the great opportunity to play CS for a living. A special thanks to cArn and f0rest, my longest standing teammates, for the fun experiences we shared. Also, thank your for the great questions and the time you put into this interview. I miss you Bullen, see you in Nangijala brother.
Photographs are all courtesy of their respective owners
