After the end of the IEM Cologne Major 2026, we had the chance to speak with Alex “Mauisnake” Ellenberg in an exclusive interview to break down the tournament in full. We discussed Falcons’ title-winning run, FURIA’s unexpected Grand Final appearance, NAVI and Vitality’s disappointing exits, the biggest individual standouts of the Major, and where Cologne ranks among the best CS2 Majors so far.
Looking back at the Major, what was your biggest takeaway from Cologne? Which team surprised you the most?
I would say my biggest surprise of the Major easily was Falcons actually going on and winning it. It always felt like this team had the capability in terms of individuals to win tournaments, but they’d never put all the pieces together at once. So for karrigan to assemble the team and to get the absolute most out of it, you really couldn’t ask for more out of anybody. It is extraordinarily impressive how he was able to put everybody in the right place and win a tournament while he himself practically didn’t have to shoot anybody.
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Do you think FURIA’s easier playoff path affected their final, or were Falcons simply that good?
I fully believe that the upper half of the playoff bracket was going to produce the Grand Final winner, whether that was Spirit, Vitality, or Falcons. If any of those three teams made it through that side of the bracket, they would have beaten FURIA. FURIA weren’t bad. They were not bad because they came out of an easier side of the bracket. Going into the tournament, they never really were the top-dog contender for me. They were always going to be fifth place.
I even would have put NAVI as a more likely contender to win the Major than FURIA. So for them to even make it to the Grand Final is a great run and probably a bit fortunate that they didn’t have to face any of the teams I already named in the playoffs beforehand.
What happened to NAVI at this tournament, and why did they fail to make the playoffs?
To be fair to NAVI, the three teams that they lost to in the group stage all made it to the playoffs. So that is a run that is really impressive. Coming into this tournament, they definitely had what it took. We saw that. I don’t think anybody can take away their season from them, that they won at Atlanta, that they won at ESL Pro League. Both of those tournaments were legit in that they were the best of the competition there. However, NAVI is the kind of team that needs everything to go right for them to win.
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They aren’t always going to stack up with the other likely favorites, including Vitality, Falcons, even Spirit. Person to person, they need vetoes that go their way. They need their individuals to have good enough games. And they need to essentially have a game plan tailored for every opponent that outplays them. That’s the faith that I put in Aleksib and I put in B1ad3, that they can come up with those kinds of ideas that put their players in winning positions, even if they’re outmatched on a man-to-man basis. But it also didn’t all go their way.
I do have to actually draw into question some of the vetoes from B1ad3. I don’t think he was perfect on those throughout it. I think the series versus G2, the final map, not going to Ancient at any point in the veto and instead going to Inferno as a pick, and then also letting it get down to Mirage.
I think that you really needed to get Ancient in this veto. It’s just simply put, your star player’s best map. It’s b1t’s best map. So if he doesn’t get to play his best map, then he won’t perform to 100%. That’s the main part of it. If you think you can get frozen for iM, you make that move without even thinking twice. Per position, frozen can play absolutely every single position that iM can play. He is more consistent mechanically.
The aspects that iM brings as an individual are more so that he’s a great team player. He understands how B1ad3 wants to operate a team. He can also be a great secondary caller. You may lose some of that when you bring in frozen, who doesn’t quite know exactly how these rounds are structured inside and out. But after the initial teething period, where frozen does end up learning everything, you’re probably working for two or three months. Then you’re going to see huge returns on replacing iM with frozen.
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Vitality entered the Major as one of the favorites, but they never reached their best level. What happened to them?
In the Falcons series, they did get ecoed twice. In the final half of Dust2, they got beat by pistols twice. They would have won that map if they were able to convert on their first gun round against Falcons’ pistols.
Some of that was down to Falcons having good ideas, but that’s just going to happen against Falcons. You’re going to have m0NESY get a Scout kill, you’re going to have kyousuke get a Deagle headshot, you’re going to have TeSeS hit a Deagle headshot, and NiKo, of course. That is just simply Counter-Strike.
Every single map between Falcons and Vitality went to all 24 rounds. It’s not like they played well beneath themselves. But it is safe to say that they played at a B, B-minus level by their own standards that they’ve set.
That’s not going to cut it. Even when they played at a B, B-minus level, they still almost beat the team that ended up winning the Major. So this was theirs to win.
If I had to boil it down to anything, I think that having a run as impressive as Vitality did for this season, where they won five more trophies, was just too much. It’s incredibly hard to sustain that level of play for another season.
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The difference is that this team was competing for a bare minimum semifinal at every single tournament they attended for almost 20 tournaments in a row. That takes a lot more out of you than a team that wins one tournament, loses three in the group stage, then wins one tournament. It’s much harder to maintain top fours for over a year than for a team that is winning and losing, winning and losing.
In some ways, it’s actually more impressive what they did. Even if Falcons win, say, three trophies in the upcoming season, I’d still say that Vitality’s run was more impressive if Falcons then come in last place at all the other tournaments. In some ways, you’re happier about winning the tournaments, but at the same time, you’re also kind of happy that you get to lose early so that you can go back, practice more, and rest a little bit more.
Having deep runs over and over again just wore them down. Then they had to take a break. Unfortunately, once they came back from that self-imposed break, where they took a whole week off before Atlanta, they just never regained that 100% A-plus form that they had.
Which team was the biggest disappointment of the Major for you?
It would be NAVI. It definitely would be NAVI to not even make it to the playoffs. I could give them an excuse because they played Spirit and Falcons, but I still think that the G2 loss was not okay.
Because we already talked about NAVI, another team that I would focus on would probably be The Huns. They were on almost everybody’s Pick’Em, including mine. They were definitely ramping up extremely nicely into the season.
They won PGL Bucharest, so that’s one of the biggest Tier 1.5 events. They were not always having deep runs at tournaments, but they showed that they were capable in a handful of tournaments, that they could win against good teams. Even in Cologne themselves, they beat G2. They beat MOUZ.
In other tournaments, they were beating teams like Astralis. They were beating teams around the top 10 regularly, without usually taking too much off the tournament favorites. They took a map off Vitality.
They showed that they had the capability to beat teams within the top five in maps and little bursts, but then they couldn’t put it together in a Swiss bracket that wasn’t easy, but was one that most people felt they were capable of.
So The Huns not making it to playoffs, and the only teams they beat being B8, who went 0-3, and MOUZ, who were playing with one and maybe even two stand-ins, is just not really impressive enough for a team that people had higher hopes for. So my biggest disappointment would probably be The Huns, along with NAVI.
After the Major, there were rumors about lonz leaving The Huns. Could that hurt the friendly vibe they were known for?
What’s interesting about it is that, first of all, I would need to know who replaces him. But you’re losing a lot when you lose lonz. You lose a guy who, even though he’s 21 years old, does have more experience than the other guys that are on The Huns.
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He played for Falcons for a while. He played for Sprout, made it to a Major with them, played under BLEED for a while. He’s played under other Tier 1 and Tier 2 organizations in the past, so he has that professionalism and experience that has helped him understand what he needs to bring to a team.
I’m not sure if anybody does that because in big moments, when they win, he’s the loudest guy cheering. I’d even go as far as to say that he got kind of weaker at the end of this year, or the last one or two events for The Huns, but for the first three months of the year, from ESL Pro League to Cluj, Krakow, and BLAST Bounty, he was always one of their best couple of players.
Even though he didn’t win the MVP at Bucharest, he was a very good player in their run. CEMENBAKTE obviously took it from him, but he was still extremely valuable.
There are going to be aggressive players who have great skill sets that could probably slot in for his positions. But I think the attitude and mindset that he brought to the team will probably hurt them a lot.
You see the other guys on the team: dem0n is very quiet, Jyo is very quiet, CEMENBAKTE is still always trying to make sure that he stays alive in these kinds of games as an AWPer with a lot of pressure on him, and current is trying to put all the tactics together every single round.
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Unless the guy comes in and just has that really happy, contagious energy, I don’t know if they’re going to have that extra bit of resolve that helped them in the past that came from lonz.
Teams like BetBoom and 9z made deeper runs than many expected. Was it a fluke, or can they repeat it?
Based off the style that both of these teams played, I’d say BetBoom was more of a fluke. It was propelled by Boombl4 having some similar characteristics to karrigan, where he can really relieve the mood and the tension on a team at any given moment while providing great tactical captain leadership.
But the individuals on BetBoom are really good, and that gives you hope for the future for them. For 9z, I think luchov has proven a lot this year already. I think he’s already kind of looking like another sort of South American insani type, where he can be incredibly aggressive, he can change rounds very easily on his own, and they set him up super nicely.
I also think dgt has proven himself. This is now two Major playoffs for him out of the last three Majors, and one of them he even won the quarterfinal game when he was on paiN Gaming. Now he could have actually beaten FURIA again when he played them here in the quarterfinal. It was close at times on map two after they even won map one.
I think there are a couple of pieces there, and I think max is actually tactically a strong leader. But the other two players are ones that I’d have concerns about. Wos is a guy I’ve never seen play this well in my life. It’s not that he even had a great rating by the end of the tournament, it’s just that he hit a lot of really crucial shots. I never saw Wos have a Tier 1 event where he had this many contributions.
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Usually, if you watch him play in the past, first of all, he doesn’t even really play that many big events year to year. Last year, he didn’t play any. Even remembering him in 2024 on 9z, in a few of those runs, he was really bad, very much a weak link for the team. At Rio in 2024 and Cologne in 2024, even against somewhat weaker opposition, he was kind of bad. So in 2026, he may have improved a little bit, but I’m personally not sure if he’s going to maintain this level. That’s a concern for me.
Also, martinez. If try is at all available, I know Imperial are targeting try to add him to their roster, but if they could actually get try again — reminder that he did play for 9z a few years ago — I think this team would see a huge improvement. I think try can take over games. Martinez to me is fine in some of the games, but there have been too many times when I see him play against the elite teams in the world where he is just not even close to being a good enough AWPer to beat a team that’s in the top 10.
Which player improved the most during the Major, and who was the best player of the tournament for you?
The biggest improvement for me from any player was probably kyousuke. Kyousuke under karrigan looks like a completely different player.
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It’s not that we haven’t seen the flashes before in group stages, but in playoffs, he’s always been a liability. The entire time that he was under kyxsan, you just knew that in playoffs, he was not going to show up. It was very rare. There were maybe two tournaments where you ever looked back and thought, “Okay, he wasn’t the problem.”
More times than not, he was. At Budapest, he was not really there for them. At BLAST Rivals Hong Kong, he was not a factor in that event at all. Even at Cluj this year, he was really bad.
Under karrigan, he looks like he’s completely changed as an individual.
To go to somebody that’s not on Falcons, I think molodoy also looked really good in these playoffs. That needed to happen because it was two Majors in a row where he had really awful series. Finally, he had himself a good playoffs.
That’s not without some struggles, though, because the first series he had against 9z was actually his worst series. It was against Aurora and Falcons that he finally got comfortable. FURIA bought him enough time to play on stage, get comfortable on those stages, and then play well versus teams that are actually in the top 10.
I’m really happy to see that. I think molodoy has gotten acclimated enough with the Major playoffs, and I hope to see in arena games that he continues this kind of level.
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Which underperforming teams should make roster changes before the next events?
A team we haven’t talked about that I’m really curious about is Legacy. They were a team that I also felt — I didn’t put them to make it to the next stage — but then they went 1-3 in Stage 3. It came out that they were targeting insani for n1ssim, and I’m a little bit confused if that’s going to work super well. Latto, dumau, and arT, all three of them can be fairly aggressive riflers. All insani does is run forward, so you have three, if not four, guys that just want to be very aggressive. There’s a lot of skill there, but I’m not sure how that’s going to work if nobody is going to play the lurky support roles. I imagine dumau is going to go back to some of the lurk spots because he used to do that on 00NATION and some of his older teams.
He was a bit more of a baiter back in GODSENT and 00NATION. It was only really in the last year that he became way more aggressive. So I’m really curious if he can slot back into that sort of role. I’m curious how insani is going to fit into this team. For an all-Brazilian lineup, it’s very hard to ask for more in terms of firepower. Maybe you would want to replace saadzin with nqz, and that’s pretty much it. I think you really are working with some of the best pieces out of South America, let alone Brazil. So I want to see what they’re able to do.
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Compared to all CS2 Majors, where would you rank Cologne?
I think the Spirit vs FaZe Grand Final in Shanghai was the best. That might have been the best Grand Final that we’ve had in CS2 history. I do think that it was more impressive than the Copenhagen Major Grand Final. I would rank Cologne really high. I think it was better than Budapest as a total spectacle in terms of how competitive the games were. Shanghai had a couple of strong series, but Cologne was blessed with maybe four all-time great series already. The G2 vs NAVI one was extremely tense at the end of Stage 3. The NRG vs BIG game at the end of Stage 1 was unbelievable. It’s never really happened before that we talked about a Stage 1 game that much.
The only time we’ve ever talked about a Stage 1 game was when FaZe barely made it through defusing against RED Canids on Nuke at Budapest Stage 1. Stage 3 had a lot of great games. The 9z vs Spirit series going all three maps, with overtime on all three of them, was insane. 9z beating Vitality was incredible. The way BetBoom was able to beat some of the teams that they beat was great. Again, the G2 vs NAVI game was excellent as well.
Going into the playoffs, Spirit vs G2 was my favorite series of the year. I really hope that magixx gets graffiti for what he did on Mirage there. Falcons vs Vitality was super tense as well, the way Falcons were able to burst through at the end, and then Spirit vs Falcons. I think you had six series in Cologne that I would gladly watch back. I would willingly watch back Spirit vs 9z, 9z vs Vitality, Spirit vs G2 quarters, Falcons vs Vitality quarters, Spirit vs Falcons semis, and BIG vs NRG Stage 1. I don’t know if I could say I would want to watch six games back of any previous Major. So it might just be the best, but I think the Shanghai Grand Final still holds the crown.
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Valve announced that Cache is back, while Overpass has been removed. What was your reaction, and which teams benefit or lose the most?
My opinion on the change is that I am very happy to see Cache come back. My problem is that I would have wanted it for a different map. When you take out one map that is much more strategic, has much more depth, way more options, and different types of play-calling that all can work out in their own way, and you add in a map that is not going to be tactical, it’s not going to be that interesting for the person that wants to watch the radar and see how the pieces move around.
Cache is a lot drier. It’s generally just about getting mid control for the Ts, and then you split through A through highway or you split through vents to B. You also have your A executes off spawn or your B hits off not very much. The default is not that interesting because everything is just flat angles. But I like it because it’s easy to understand, it’s easy to play, and it is fun to play. I like playing Cache personally. But to spectate professional Counter-Strike and to think about how the pro teams are going to work on this map, I’m waiting to be disproven that there’s going to be any sort of significant meta shift with the map from what there was seven years ago when it was last played at IEM Katowice in 2019.
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I never really found myself too interested in the macro of it. For teams that are going to improve, it’s going to be the ones that banned Overpass. Even though it’s a tactical map, NAVI never really played Overpass, so that might help them out. Now NAVI could ban out Dust2 and try to play Cache instead. It will 100% help out Falcons because if they don’t want to play Cache, they can just ban it because they banned Overpass before. But they’ll probably want to play Cache, and then they can move away from something else in their map pool that they’re not really liking as much.
With karrigan, I would probably move away from Mirage just because the T side hasn’t really come together for them on that map. Everything else is kind of clicking. Their Anubis has looked pretty good. Their Dust2 is world class. They will always be willing to play Ancient. So for Falcons and NAVI, this is a buff for sure. But for the teams that picked Overpass — Vitality, FURIA, G2, and even MOUZ — those teams are definitely going to have a little bit of a harder time now.
It also helps Spirit because Overpass was their sixth-best map. It was the one map that you could kind of punish-pick them on. They even lost that one to 9z, for example. I think this is a great day for Falcons, Spirit, and NAVI. But for all the other Tier 1 teams that would punish-pick it against those guys, now it’s a bad time.
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FURIA played well on Train before it was removed, and now Overpass is gone too. Which map do you think could be removed next?
If I had to make a guess now, it’s been shown that they’re not worrying about the professional level of play too much when it comes to these maps. They just see what is being played by the amateurs. I think it comes down now to what’s popular and not popular for the average player. The average player wants to play Mirage, Ancient, and Inferno.
The sad thing that I’m considering is that they might remove Nuke. I don’t think they should. I think we’re really heading in a bad direction if they decide to do that.
If they remove Nuke next, then I think this is sort of the beginning of the death of more tactical Counter-Strike. There are strategies that are always going to be at play on any map. It doesn’t matter how basic the map is, professional players will find a way to make it more tactical and provide consistency.
But Overpass was a map that every single team that picked it in Stage 3 and the playoffs won because they were better on it tactically. Now you’re introducing a map that is going to be much more of a coin flip, and I almost feel like Valve just kind of wants those kinds of maps.
