karrigan: [Cobble] gamble paid off

发布时间：2025-04-21 05:47:08 来源：cs battle 作者：case drop

After FaZe's overtime win against North we talked to the European team's in-game leader Finn "karrigan" Andersen about the Cobble match against Astralis and what it means in their rivalry.

The European mixture FaZe is currently 2-1 in the Swiss system after wins against North and Renegades and a loss to Astralis.

karrigan thinks a win against Astralis could get them the #1 spot

To hear more about the tournament so far, the veto mind-games with Lukas "⁠gla1ve⁠" Rossander and the CT side struggle against North, we talked to Finn "⁠karrigan⁠" Andersen.

Your last two placings were the second place at IEM Katowice and the win at StarSeries S3, both against Astralis. Coming here, did you feel like a favorite in a way, like the team with the best latest form? What was the feeling coming into IEM Sydney?

I think it's the same feeling we had for Kiev, we feel like we are a top contender for the title, I think it's more about feeling good individually than thinking you are favorites to win the tournament. I still think Astralis is the best team in the world, but I think we can make the argument against that if we beat them at this tournament. Maybe we face them in the BO5 finals, if we win that I'll probably say that we are the team that can beat Astralis. They are the team that has been in five finals in a row, seven semi-finals or something like that, they are the number one team in the world right now, we are not the favorites to win the tournament.

You started with the game against Renegades, they had some openings but you seemed to close out the rounds and close out the game pretty well in the end. How did you see the match from your eyes?

I think Renegades lacked some experience in specific situations, the way they attacked in the rounds when they had an entry frag… I think we rotated well on the CT side as well, so maybe it was hard for them to find the right mid round call in the end. But they played pretty good in the end, had some good duels to begin with, got good openings, so as I said they probably lacked experience and mid-round decisions.

The second match you had was against Astralis, that the interesting veto that ended up on Cobble. I already talked to gla1ve about his perspective, can you give me your perspective on playing Cobblestone?

I know the guys, and the way they write on Twitter… I know they didn't practice Cobble that much, even though they say so, I know that for sure. I can't wait to play them later in the tournament and see who is going to adapt. I think, the reason we did it was to test it, and if you lose the map you are not out of the tournament. Even if you lose on another map, you might think what could've been on Cobble.

So it was a gamble, and I think the gamble paid off on having the feeling about how they play on the T side, since I decided not to show anything when we were down 12-6 on the T side of Cobble. So if I play Astralis again, I feel very comfortable in the veto. It's definitely interesting, because the only reason we practiced Cobble was to have a better map pool against Astralis - and last time it worked pretty well without having Cobble. Hopefully it will turn out good here as well.

In the match against Astralis, you were 6-0 down and then you tied 6-6, after that they ran away - what were the key things they did to get away with the match?

Well, since they say all the time that we won a lot of pistols in Kiev I can say that they won both pistols and both first full buy rounds, that is a direct 10-0. And on a map like Cobble, for us, it's hard to win so many gun rounds since we don't have that much experience or official games with this team. So if we just win one of the pistols, especially the first one when we had a 1v4 against Xyp9x, it would turn out differently. I think a 9-6 score as CT on Cobble, you are talking about having a good side. We won a lot of buy rounds in a row, we managed to come back and have a decent half, but in the end, they ran away with it.

I feel good actually, I've seen their tendencies and I don't think they have that much more than what they've shown in the match against us, so let's see what happens.

The next match was against North, you started T with a good half, but your CT was pretty lacking. What was the issue on CT on Cache?

I feel somehow, every time we play North on Cache it always feels like a completely T sided map. Either we are both bad at playing CT sides or we are both good at exploiting the weaknesses the others have when we are T. It comes down to just not being able to scrap rounds consecutively, while three out of the four rounds they won as CT were consecutive, full buy rounds. When we won, I feel we won one, we lost one, then won two and were screwed over with the money. It was a hard match, they made a huge comeback, I just feel like sometimes, when you see the situations, we should've closed it out earlier. Coming into the overtime, we were pretty confident after winning two rounds that we would close it out.

Moving on, you don't know how you are going to face, but is there anyone you wish to draw or do you just want to get the group stage over?

I don't really care who we face, obviously it would be fun to face Astralis in the elimination match if we get to that, but right now I think all the teams have been proving their worth, OpTic has been playing good lately, they haven't beaten a top team yet at this tournament but they might get away with it at this tournament by beating Renegades if they get lucky in the draw, who knows.

It comes down to the Astralis-SK match, how that is going to end and the draw is always interesting to wait and see instead of speculating. There is so many variables in the Swiss system, you just take one game at the time and hopefully next game we will qualify for the playoffs.

Touching on the system, we saw a lot of Swiss, but mostly 16 teams, this is the 8-team Swiss. What is your opinion on the system, would you rather see something else, here or in general?

I think all systems have some kind of flaw. Every team is happy to play the 16-team swiss because you can never play the same team twice. Having eight teams, this tournament might be easy to seed, you have top two teams: Astralis, us, North and SK split into two groups, but what if you have Na`Vi as well? Then you are down to who is having the favorable seed to make the groups.

I think Swiss is interesting, especially for lesser teams, you give them the chance to make the playoffs if you get the "lucky draw" you can say. All in all I like it, there are bad things about everything, playing the same team twice is pretty hard and someone will have an easier way, but that doesn't really matter in the end.

Professeur writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter.

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