How are you finding your tournament so far? Any surprises there?
Banks:Passion UA is kind of a surprise because obviously everyone’s expectations were so much lower of what they could do. But obviously then we found out from other interviews and when we were speaking to the players that, like, they’ve had nearly four weeks of constant practise grinding, no events, so they come in with a bit of an unknown quantity.
Also, I’ll just say that MongolZ, like, playing pretty good at Chengdu and dropping off was a surprise as well. So those are the two big ones so far. We’ll have to wait and see what happens throughout the rest of the tournament. But obviously, both FURIA and Vitality nearly lost their opening games. They didn’t, so it’s still a win. But that was kind of wild to have yesterday.
And what do you think of the state CS is in right now?
Saumya: Because there are obviously so many good teams right now, and I think any team can beat any team on a good day.
Banks: I feel you’re correct, yeah. Any team can beat any team on a good day. And it is a great thing for the scene that games can be so competitive. But I feel like I’ve said this before, it’s like, “oh, this might be the most competitive CS ever”. And then obviously, we had this Vitality run at the beginning of the year. Obviously, that’s changed now.
But, like, for me, if I’m looking at the Major, I’m looking at, like, there is Vitality, Falcons, MOUZ, FURIA, maybe a Spirit, right? That can have a chance of winning the Major. That’s huge. That’s five teams, all with a potential of lifting a trophy at the end of it, which makes it more exciting for the viewers and everyone along the ride, and especially if some of them maybe don’t even make playoffs.
Saumya: As an example, I saw you talked about the Zweih and Chopper quote from donk.
Banks: Yeah.
What do you feel about that?
Credit: Luc Bouchon / BLAST
Banks: It’s interesting, right? Because obviously he’s very direct, which I love. I love if a player is so honest and open in the interview that he’s just giving you his raw emotions. But I kind of understand it because Hally and Chopper make the game plan for me. I don’t have, like, 100% knowledge of this, but I look at it as, like, Hally sets out the game plan, Chopper’s got to execute it and then obviously, he’s got to help with the mid rounding.
Shiro is obviously a big voice on the team, but it’s like, for the moment, Chopper’s not performing well and also the calls are not working but obviously they’re trying to implement two new players in. I read your interview. Then when I interviewed Chopper, I did it with him directly and I said like, “what is going on?” Why is it so hard for you right now? And he said having two new players come in is very difficult and him and Hally need more demos, more games, like official games, to look at to make the adjustments to get everyone comfortable.
If you look at the last game they just played, right? They ended up beating the MongolZ 2:0 [BLAST Rivals Group A elimination match]. You saw better communication, better team flashes. But it’s Chopper now flashing for donk a bit more or putting them in situations where if you look at the old style, it was obviously a magixx or a zont1x. I gave an example of many times zont1x would be anchoring a bombsite. donk’s the player rotating in, he’d be the one who’d come in and zont1x would pull back a little bit, but he would be able to play position so well. And almost without much communication with just knowing, do the right flash for donk, know he’s going to go aggressive.
zweih and t1NR have a lot to learn in that, right? And they are rookies in the sense of they never played on a top tier team. So for them it’s a bigger gap, it’s going to take more time. But obviously when you’ve got donk at his peak and it’s now starting to affect him, I can understand why he’s frustrated and it’s not what he wants to see happening.
Saumya: Very insightful.
What do you think of the current Faze situation? Because they obviously had a very dry run, but do you think jcobbb is a problem?
Credit: Stephanie Lindgren / BLAST
Banks: I think the Faze situation is like a scrambling situation. They’ve tried to do so many events, they’ve tried to do so much in a little time. They also had the rain situation where he came back for a bit and I feel like, yes, everyone knows jcobbb’s not performing so good, but he’s also got so much pressure on him because it’s a Faze jersey and maybe on the mental side it’s having some effects on him because the worst thing that happened was they made playoffs with rain at EPL.
They looked good and then the straight next event they bomb out and they’ve got jcobbb. So it’s like even harsher criticism on him. I’m hoping that after the Major, they can actually look at this and think, like, “if we’ve done good or bad or what we need to do next steps”. Because you can’t just keep saying he needs more time for a huge amount of time. Remember, he did start well. We saw him in London first, I think it was. Or maybe just a bit before that. So for me, the Major is going to be the chance where we can really criticise and say if he’s going to be good enough or not.
But as of right now, he’s not at the level they need him to be. And this is even when sometimes you’re getting good performances out of Twistzz or Frozen, for example. Broky, though, is probably a little bit of a worry that people are not really talking about so much because he kind of started so strong when he came back and now it’s slowly declining as well. So there’s a lot of problems going on in Faze right now. And poor Karrigan might be having to go through maybe his toughest test yet with all of this because it’s a lot of changes in one year. You think Elige, jcobbb now rain. It’s just so much.
Do you think this spot is in danger with the current Faze lineup?
Banks: Karrigan’s spot? Yeah, I think for.. Karrigan has always said, right, if the team and the players still believe in him, then he’ll stay doing it. But if they don’t, he doesn’t want to continue with it. So it’s more a question on if the players are going to believe in him. Definitely Frozen. I think Twistzz [is] always going to believe in him and have that trust in him. jcobbb’s got to learn this as well. Broky needs to trust in himself some more.
So I’m not going to say Karrigan’s a problem yet, because he still knows how to call a great game. And when you are calling a great game and when your individuals are doing well, the results will come, even if he’s not personally performing so well. But obviously the next logical role for him would be to go into a coaching role and move from there. But then you have to fix another problem if they try to get another IGL. So all of this is very complicated and I don’t think they have the right answer for this right now.
Saumya: And finally, touching on BC.game, they got ElectroNic and their performance has somehow dropped even more.
Banks: Oh, yes.
What do you think of that?
Credit: Luc Bouchon / BLAST
Banks: It’s a bad sign because obviously this was a chance for ElectroNic to prove himself. Now I would assume that he’s back with s1mple, he should be super motivated right now. The fact that he’s playing even worse and he’s not IGL-ing and obviously he’s having to switch to English. He does have like, we’ve done English interviews with him. He is capable of communicating in English but it’s still not as easy as people think to be able to change where you’ve only spoken on a Russian speaking team this whole time and then he has to change into it.
S1mple obviously is doing great work for the majority of games for BC.game but like when you have s1mple on the team the expectations are always going to be higher and ElectroNic now needs to push himself higher and get out of the rut he’s in. But right now it’s not good and it’s not giving them the desired result. It’s actually been a negative so far. So for them like, even I expected them at giveaway at least to be in the final and then they didn’t even get close to well they finished, was it fifth to eighth?
Maybe it’s just off top of my memory but yeah, like their first LAN and it was like that. It’s not ideal.
Do you think we will see s1mple in a top 10 team again?
Banks: We can see that he’s motivated and he’s playing a lot. We can ignore him playing Dota like he’s allowed to play whatever he wants in his free time but he was playing a lot of CS right and he’s playing officials again. It’s all about whether a team wants to, obviously, pay so much money for him. But I think the best way for him to do it right now is not going to another team but BC.game, allowing him to build the team he wants, you know, build him the players he wants and maybe that means some other players need to go again and come back in but I think that’s the for me personally that’s the best way he can rise his way into the top echelon of CS again because he’s expensive, we all know that.
You try and buy him out, he’s the greatest of all time but it comes with a cost and BC.game are the ones who got him out of the NAVI side of things. But now it’s about what he can make of that going forward. So I’d love to see it but it doesn’t seem like we’re quite there yet, even if his skill is actually there. But like the symbol of old we’ve been able to carry, even at that Red Bull giveaway, for example. And right now, that didn’t happen.
Wallowing in his long-term, wildly unhealthy relationship with Counter-Strike, Saumya has now turned into a full-blown FaZe fan who likes to write about things he loses his sleep over.
