Hi Robin, first, I would like you to guide us through your DreamHack preparation and give us some insight how the recording of the TV6 show was. What do you remember specifically from this period? Looking back would you say that the recording of the TV show had a good impact on your training or not?

Well our preparation for DreamHack was a bit too extreme I'd say, we had close to 3 weeks of bootcamp prior to the event because of the recent tournament results we had and we really wanted to get back in shape for the biggest tournament of the year. I do feel however that we played great during dreamhack up until the final where we really underperformed. Not taking anything away from fnatic, they played great, but I feel that we could've done a better job than we did vs. them.

The recording of the TV6 show was a very fun experience for all of us. It was a lot of hard work, they said for about 60 minutes of recording, they get around 1 minute of solid material for the TV show, so you guys can just imagine how many hours we spent filming it. A 14 minute episode took us around 14 hours to record. So yes I do believe that it did have an impact on us as players, but after the success the TV Show had with everyone that watched, I think it was worth it.

When your nickname is Fifflaren, when you won nearly everything in 2013, when you put all your energy into winning THE tournament of the year, how do you come back from a loss in the final?

Well, it's always painful to lose a tournament when you played great up until the final. But CS:GO is growing at a pretty fast pace, so even though we ended up losing the DreamHack finals, we knew that there would be more tournaments like that to look forward to, and now in 2 weeks we have EMS One Katowice, so we are looking to redeem ourselves by trying to win that tournament.


Shed some light onto the recent changes within the team. Why did you decide to give the lead to GeT_RiGhT after DreamHack Winter 2013? Was it a team call or Xizt’s decision?

Our team has always been based on communication in-game or outside of the game, we had a meeting after DreamHack and talked about what we could do to try and improve, GT wanted to give calling a try for our last 2 tournaments of the year to see how it was, and we also wanted to give Xizt a chance to get back to his form that he had at the start of the year. So in short, GT wanted to try and call and Xizt wanted to get his old form back.

 Fifflaren, the TV star.

Now that you are ingame leader again. Why did you go back to the position you filled back in 2012 when NiP started?

After our holiday break we had at the end of 2013 / early 2014 we had another meeting the day before we started to practice to see if GT still wanted to call and what our overall thoughts were on our playstyle and what we could do to improve heading into the 2014 tournaments, we felt that we needed a bit more structure and that's where I came in the picture. Back in 2012 when we first formed the team, I was the in-game leader because I came from a source background and the game was at the time very similar to CS:Source, so it made sense for me to call. After a few tournaments when our 1.6 players got used to the game, we swapped to Xizt to give players a more free role in-game, which turned out to be a good decision. But as of late, teams have really improved and we wanted to get some structure back in the team, which is where I come in again as an in-game leader.

What would you say is the key difference between your leading style and the style of Xizt?

I think the major difference is structure. Xizt had a very laid back style of calling, utilizing our aimers to get picks and work from that. My way of calling is a bit more structured, now don't get me wrong. I still give the players room to do what they do best, but with a more structured approach.

As the new team captaing what are your main goals in 2014? Is winning EMS One Katowice your main objective?

Our main goal right now is obviously to win EMS One Katowice, but we still have a lot of work to do. We will bootcamp 1 week prior to EMS so hopefully we get everything sorted on time.

Can NiP be crowned at the EMS Katowice?