Cr1t- at BLAST Slam 6 Malta: “You can’t expect good results just because you won in the past”

Andreas Franck “Cr1t-” Nielsen etched himself into the annals of Dota 2 history last season by finally winning The International after 13 years of trying.

I had a chance to sit down with him ahead of the BLAST Slam 6 Malta playoffs, to get his thoughts on Team Falcons’ form right now, how they bounce back from setbacks, and what it was that allowed him to hoist the Aegis of Champions for the first time in his career.

You guys are always favorites wherever you go, but for BLAST Slam 6 in particular, what would you say about your performance so far?

Cr1t-: It’s been a pretty rocky start to this year for us. We had to play qualifiers for a few tournaments in January, then straight after that, we went into the BLAST Slam 6 group stage, and I just think we’re not quite in good shape right now. We were pretty happy that we even made it here, because we’re in a pretty bad state, and we kind of had to pull ourselves together in order to make it to the LAN portion. So we’re very happy to be here in Malta now, because we weren’t really sure how well we would perform.

But yeah, not the most secure group stage for us. I think we didn’t have much control over what was going on. We kind of had to find ourselves and work through out, and I think at the end we managed to scrape through. Also, the format being best-of-five from here is going to be interesting, and I think it’s going to help us a little bit as well.

Patrick: Actually, I was about to ask about the format. This is the first time that we’re ever going to see a tournament where there’s potentially three Bo5s in a row for any team coming from the first part of the bracket.

But, you mentioned that it might favor Falcons. Why exactly is that?

Cr1t-: Just from all the teams that are in the tournament still, we are by far the team with the most experience in Bo5s. A lot of the teams haven’t played Bo5s before like Na’Vi and OG, and some of them are very new as rosters as well. So I think that kind of helps us. Team Liquid obviously have experience; they have old Gaimin Gladiators players and they’ve obviously played big tournaments before.

But the other teams are pretty fresh in that department. Like some players might have played some Bo5s, but I think just the fact that we’ve been together for this long, and having played so many tournaments where we reached the grand finals, just makes us very comfortable.

Patrick: Tying in with comfort levels and all, I believe it was Sneyking who mentioned at DreamLeague Season 27 that the team wasn’t in the best form. But we all know you guys have been pretty consistent over the years.

Does the idea of your names always being in the conversation about the greatest rosters of all time get in the way of playing on a day-to-day basis?

Cr1t-: That’s not something that you really think about, like for any of us. I think we just play the game, and you can’t expect to have good results just because you won some tournaments in the past. You can only really gauge your performance based on the last tournament you played, and for us that was DreamLeague where we didn’t do very well. So we don’t look at ourselves as the “best team in the world” if we’re not performing like it.

Patrick: How do you deal with things not quite going your way for an extended period of time? For example, 2025 was kind of an up and down year for you, aside from your second place finish at Esports World Cup (EWC). But you went ahead and won The International 2025 (TI14) anyway.

What was it that finally clicked and allowed you to bring it home?

Cr1t-: That’s a good question. I think we had a very rocky season last year because we had some visa problems. We didn’t really get a chance to boot camp and actually prepare for tournaments very well. The one time during the season when we had a boot camp with the full roster there was, I think it was a FISSURE tournament, where we played and lost against Tundra Esports in the grand final.

But it was good. It was a good tournament, and we came close to winning. Other than that, the only other tournament we had a boot camp for was EWC. In hindsight, when we look back at it, we kind of understood that we needed to have proper preparation for tournaments in order for us to have a good performance. That’s how we managed to step up massively for EWC, and get second place even though we weren’t looking very good going into that tournament.

For TI14, it was kind of the same thing. We had good preparation, and we also just had some good talks during the tournament, because it was also a rocky group stage for us. Then we had to play Team Spirit for elimination. But we had some good talks that kind of just pushed us to a better mindset. As a team, just going into TI14, we didn’t set our expectations too high either, which made it so that when we went through the playoffs, we were very confident and never really got frustrated with each other.

Patrick: I remember talking to MoonMeander in Singapore for BLAST Slam 4, and he also mentioned that Tundra had visa issues with Whitemon as well which prevented them from boot camping properly.

What’s the next best thing when you can’t have a full blown boot camp?

Cr1t-: For us, we would just play online, but it’s not quite as impactful as when you’re spending time with all the players in the same room. You get more conversation about Dota, you get to develop more as a team — whereas when you’re playing online or you’re playing scrims, you’ll be on Discord or whatever for a few hours, and then that’s it.

So that’s the second best option, which is what we did for the BLAST Slam 6 qualifiers, and also for DreamLeague. But yeah, coming into Slam 6, we had a boot camp, and I think it helped us kind of get through this rough patch. Hopefully we manage to get through it some more, and we’ll see if we can be a bit better in the playoffs.

Patrick: I wanted to talk about your roster, which hasn’t changed a single time since the Falcons organization entered the Dota 2 scene in 2023.

In an industry where team continuity isn’t as common as in traditional sports, what is it that has allowed you to stick together for so long?

Cr1t-: I think for us, we had a very good first year. We were all very hungry to win, and we kind of proved to each other that there’s no “grass is greener on the other side” in any way. We might have had some dips in form, or individual performances might not have been there, but we knew where we could get [ourselves] if we just worked hard.

So, naturally that just means that you have no desire to split up or remove players, because everyone has a lot of trust in each other that they’re trying their best to improve. It’s easy in a way to stick together when that’s the case.

Patrick: You, skiter, and Sneyking are older in age than Malr1ne and ATF.

But who would you say among the three of you is the best at mentoring the two?

Cr1t-: We all do it in different ways. It’s taken a bit of time to adjust to it and figure out how to deal with it, because when we started the team, we obviously had two players coming from not-so-professional backgrounds. They didn’t come from structured teams like me, skiter, and Sneyking did. So, we had to teach them things like: how does it all work professionally? How do you develop best as a team?

And back then, we didn’t have Aui_2000 with us yet, so a lot of that came down to skiter and Sneyking. They kind of brought what they had from Tundra, and we developed that as a team. When Aui came in, we would all still mentor them differently. We’re very different people, me, skiter, and Sney, so we all help the kids in different ways in order for them to develop. So I wouldn’t say that it’s just one of us doing it.

Do you see yourself retiring any time soon, or do you feel like you could stay on the grind still?

Cr1t-: I think for me, there’s not that much time left. I’ve always wanted to stay ahead of the burnout, and I’ve never wanted to compete like, half-assed. Hopefully, we have a good showing at TI15, and we’ll see what happens after that. But for now, I’m just focused on one tournament at a time, and I’m still having fun, so yeah.