Mauisnake has strong views on what is holding Falcons back, but his proposed solution goes beyond replacing one struggling player. Speaking to SkinClub during PGL Masters Bucharest, the analyst discussed why he wants NiKo to take over as in-game leader, his concerns about r1nkle’s role in G2, and what makes MOUZ such a difficult opponent for Spirit. He also made the case for Boombl4 as one of the modern era’s best callers and explained why Counter-Strike’s finances are forcing organisations to reconsider their spending.
You’ve called kyousuke one of the least coachable players in tier-one CS. What makes you think he’s the problem rather than Falcons failing to develop him?
Even though there have been faults with karrigan and zonic in recent history, notably karrigan’s poor individual form and zonic’s inability to get multiple CS2 rosters to a Major despite a wealth of talent options, I still feel that, given kyousuke is the newest and youngest player on the team, they should be devoting a significant amount of their focus there. The rest of the team is already up to speed.
m0NESY is an incredibly self-sufficient player. NiKo is practically good enough to be an IGL today, so you don’t really need to tell him what to do. TeSeS has been in multiple systems that have proved successful, whether it was his time with Heroic or the later iteration of Heroic. In Falcons, he’s proven himself as a great support-role player, and kyousuke has been the most inconsistent.
I look at the games and see kyousuke making rudimentary mistakes, pushing in a four-on-four through smoke with completely zero support and no real reason to be doing that. It happened on Ancient in multiple games in a row that I’ve covered this season. I see a lot of mistakes that you would call rookie mistakes, player ego swinging. These are the kinds of things you would hope would be drilled out of a player much earlier in their career.
To me, kyousuke has only shown this season that he’s regressed from the previous one. I have to imagine that, as Falcons are working on putting together a season that builds off the success of the Major, they would have tried to instil some values and fundamentals into this guy. Unfortunately, every consecutive event this season, starting with the online Bounty, then EWC, Porto, EPL and Thunderpick, he’s just sliding down as an individual. It’s not even the level of opposition.
There has been a lot of criticism directed towards karrigan because Falcons have struggled to win trophies. How much of it is justified? If they finish in the top three or four at the Major, would you give him more time?
I personally have a hard time believing you’re going to be consistent winners with an IGL who frags at this level. I talked to apEX for SkinClub before a Major recently, and his words echoed my sentiments. If the guy I consider the best leader right now is also saying this, that means something. I originally thought it, and he said something extremely similar.
I don’t think, in history, we’ve seen consistent success with a player who has fragged that badly. You can win a tournament here or there with a poorly rated player. Karrigan’s done it before, to his credit. I will say that, in terms of pure mid-rounding ability, karrigan is an elite caller. He’s definitely still up there when it comes to the mental capacity.
I don’t see that many bad T-side errors in terms of calling into a stack, running out of time or making huge mistakes like that. In fact, his mid-rounding was one of the best aspects of their Cologne run. I can appreciate karrigan’s mid-rounding while also recognising that there is a floor, and he’s really trying to see how low he can go with his individual ability. I don’t think that’s sustainable. A T side is great, but being able to hold your bombsite is another thing that wins games.
If you were made the general manager of Falcons and had full control, including over the coach, what changes would you make?
If I have full control of Falcons and a budget like theirs, my immediate change is to really sell NiKo on the idea that he should become the in-game leader. I want to win. I want to recoup the money I’ve spent. I would like to have an era if I’m putting together what is likely the most expensive team in all of Counter-Strike, and maybe Counter-Strike history.
I want the guy who has proven he can win as a caller in the past. A reminder that more than a handful of NiKo’s trophies in his career were with him at the helm as IGL, as recently as the IEM Dallas win. In CS, he won a handful of events with FaZe as the in-game leader too. He definitely won events around 2019 as a caller, so there’s room for him to shift into that role.
I genuinely don’t think there’s a better way to give Falcons a significant upgrade today than finding somebody to replace karrigan in his positions. If I were to make an actual move for karrigan, I’m thinking about his roles and positions. A guy who’s caught my eye lately, who fits karrigan’s spots almost one-to-one, would be great as an entry fragger, and has had success with NiKo and m0NESY before, is malbsMd.
Malbs is almost wasting his prime with Liquid right now. He’s playing really great CS, and he plays some of those exact roles: hard anchor, hard entry. That’s what karrigan does, and malbs is doing it at a near-elite level. He’s such a strong player, and I think he understands how to work around NiKo and m0NESY. The firepower of that roster, just with the one-for-one, would be absurd. I’m sure there are better people, but that’s just off the top of my head.
You’ve defended r1nkle despite G2’s poor results. I was speaking to Scrawny earlier, and he suggested that perhaps huNter- isn’t able to use him properly. What are your views after his recent performances?
I have bought into r1nkle’s potential, and this move for G2 was definitely a gamble. SunPayus had a better floor as an AWPer, but he didn’t always have the highest highs. Some of that has been reflected in the overall ratings r1nkle has had in comparison to SunPayus. The problem is that it’s rare. We don’t always get to see r1nkle’s full potential against top teams.
Something that has boded well for him is that his ceiling has already proven to be very high against roughly top-10 opponents. At the beginning of the season, he had a 1.7 rating against FURIA in a game. He had a 2.48, above a two rating, against an Aurora team people are considering in that contender range, a top-five-ish team. In fact, he did that twice against Aurora just a couple of days apart. Unfortunately, the longer r1nkle has been on this team, the less I’ve had to like. He’s declined this season too.
In the beginning, what I saw from r1nkle was that he went for a lot of picks. He was really banking on his ability and skill in situations that were ill-advised, things you would probably want to coach out of a player. You would want to say, “Hey, that risk isn’t really worth it.” The problem now is that r1nkle isn’t even finding opportunities. Entire games are going by on the CT side where he’s just not an involved player.
In their final loss to Aurora in overtime at PGL Bucharest, they went to r1nkle a single time on a gun round. He got a great 2K, an opening kill and a second kill as they approached the bombsite, and he did his job. The problem was that Aurora’s whole game plan revolved around going to the B bombsite. I would have expected r1nkle to rotate over, for them to involve him in top-banana control, throw a smoke for him, have him fight through the opposing team’s molotov or flashes. Just get his AWP involved.
Instead of letting him shine as this combat AWPer, which is his strength, they’re now telling him to play like SunPayus. What we’re finding out is that’s just not his game. If he has to be a stationary turret, he can be. He has rounds where he shows that potential, and he showed it earlier in the season through full maps. Now you’re seeing a guy who’s throwing every flashbang, who always has the bomb and has to plant it.
His T side, which I was excited about because I thought they could use him as another rifling piece, has been totally nerfed too, because now he’s that fully supportive element. G2 is a team that focuses more on setting up its riflers than him as an AWPer. That might be a “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” situation. Did they stop helping him because he started missing shots, or did he start having fewer opportunities to hit shots because they stopped setting him up?
It could go both ways. It’s hard to know how those conversations went within G2. I’m definitely not as high on r1nkle as I was when they made the move and in the first couple of tournaments, but I do think G2 have greater issues than just r1nkle. I wouldn’t blame him for all their losses, especially at a Bucharest event where they played competition they should have beaten. That’s not just on him.
MOUZ have consistently beaten Spirit, even when donk has performed well. What is it about them that allows them to counter Spirit so effectively?
There are a couple of things I’ve noticed with Spirit versus MOUZ lately. They’ve beaten them, as far as I know, three times in a row: twice at EPL and now at Bucharest. One guy who’s really surprising me and continues to impress, even though he doesn’t always pop off in every series, is xelex. In the head-to-head with donk, he’s really held his own.
Even though xelex didn’t have a great overall series in their match at Bucharest, his head-to-head with donk was just minus one. That’s your bombsite anchor who can usually take down donk, and that’s something I would say they didn’t always have. Xelex, as an individual, is really good. The MOUZ Twitter account is sure to remind me of this multiple times. They’ve actually kept a tally of xelex versus donk in his career, and it’s been quite favourable for xelex.
I’m not sure what the tally is today. The last couple of games may have gotten away from xelex a bit more, but in the beginning, when he was on MOUZ, and I would assume up until now, it’s been pretty good. For example, in the Porto series that Spirit won 3-1, xelex still had a positive kill-death against donk. He was plus one against him. It’s surprising that over that much of a sample size, he’s been such a strong individual.
I also buy into the idea that we’ve seen donk’s tendencies enough. These professional teams have looked at heat maps enough. We’ve seen the opening plays donk really likes, and just like teams game-plan against AWPers, you can game-plan against a rifler. With everybody else on Spirit falling short right now, and I don’t put the losses on donk, if he doesn’t perform against a very well-rounded, complete MOUZ team, they aren’t really going to have the secondary options.
On top of that, Spirit’s T sides sometimes aren’t very imaginative. They aren’t very creative. If the B pop on Dust2 doesn’t work against Spinx and PR, that’s one of their three plays gone. If their cat swing doesn’t work because they’re getting shut down by torzsi and good counter-utility, or just getting naded, that’s their other play. If they don’t get long spawns, they’re not really going to be able to take down xelex, because once he gets set up at long, MOUZ are going to be fine.
MOUZ can erect fortresses on different maps that Spirit have a very hard time breaking through, because Spirit don’t really trick their opponents very often. It’s rare you see Spirit with a game plan that creates enough misdirection for the other guys to get involved. That’s usually when you see the great tN1R game, because he’s set up. He’s lurking through window on Mirage or flanking B. Those are the X-factor moments. If it’s just donk versus five and that’s your entire plan, because sometimes Spirit’s game plan is just that, MOUZ have enough answers.
BetBoom went 3-0 at Bucharest, beating both Spirit and NAVI. Have we underestimated Boombl4 as an IGL, and could he achieve more with a genuinely elite roster?
On Hot Take Point Made, probably about four months ago, I brought Boombl4’s name back into the conversation as one of the greatest IGLs out there. I would already say his CS2 résumé has to speak for itself. I’m definitely not going to say I’m someone who’s underrated him. I’ve given him a lot of credit.
The hot take I had was that Boombl4 is a top-six IGL of the modern era. He’s got a Major trophy and a Grand Slam. He got to the Copenhagen Major playoffs with no AWPer on his team. It was Ax1Le, HObbit, electronic, Perfecto and himself. Two of those guys aren’t even on teams right now. Electronic and Perfecto aren’t on teams, and HObbit is barely holding on as a player on PARIVISION. He’s got a 0.8-something rating. Ax1Le just got back into tier one with the run 1win had, and Boombl4 has been the guy who’s kept his position in tier one for really this whole time.
He’s kind of been the lone survivor of a Copenhagen Major playoff team that has really no one else to show for it. Then there’s the recent one with BetBoom, making it to the playoffs with a stand-in. That’s karrigan-level stuff. People don’t really want to give him that credit because, I think, they saw the blow-up involving his ex-wife and all of that. Those are situations that happen outside the server. I’m not carrying over judgment of a player who was, I would say, a little too lustful in a formative period of his life, and then everybody makes fun of him for that.
He was calling legitimate T sides. He levelled up as a caller. In the beginning, when Boombl4 first became the in-game leader for NAVI, there were a lot of mistakes. There were rounds where they ran out of time, where they couldn’t put together a strong enough T side on Dust2 to get to the bombsite in time. That’s a map where it’s just inexcusable. But he learned.
Over time with NAVI, they went from having some pretty bad tournaments early on, or playing well beneath what you would have expected for the players on their team, to showing marked improvement. At the Berlin Major, he was still playing with Zeus, but he was being groomed to be the IGL. Not long after B1ad3 got there and Zeus was off the team, we started seeing improvement in the way they could put pressure on multiple sides of the map at the same time.
People will always discount Boombl4 for that because you look at that team and the firepower is really strong. You had b1t, who was super overqualified in some of the extremity positions because of his time to kill. You had electronic, a great aggressive rifler, a can opener. You had what was probably the best CS player of all time in s1mple. You’re not going to see people giving credit to him.
It’s what he did after that I found, in some ways, even more impressive. It served as a reminder that he was a very legitimate IGL who got better over the time he was with NAVI. It was roughly two to two-and-a-half years of him being their in-game leader. If you looked at the first three months versus the last nine months, it was a huge difference. From practically Cologne 2021 up until even the Antwerp Major, they were playing really high-quality Counter-Strike. It wasn’t quite as good towards the end, but that’s also when the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, so I’m sure tensions were very high in that team.
Would it make sense to bring Boombl4 into Spirit?
Boombl4 would be a direct upgrade for magixx. You can make that a headline if you want. That’s what it is. But the reality is that I wouldn’t even mind if magixx stayed on the team, because in a lot of tournaments he’s doing a decent job in some of these very low-utility, poor-resource positions.
In their losing series against NAVI today, for example, he had a better rating than everybody. He’s not by any means a bad player. He’s one of the best-fragging IGLs we have right now, and you would assume that if you gave this guy a chance to just be a player again, he could be better. If you look at the past three months, he has a 0.97 and zont1x has a 0.99. That’s a zont1x who gets to play catwalk on Mirage, while magixx has every bad position and is always using a Five-SeveN or an MP9. That shouldn’t be happening.
If you say, “Boombl4, you’re coming in. Wait, not for magixx, for zont1x,” then we have a team with a very capable, almost overqualified support player in magixx, who’s still only 23 years old. He’s still got a lot of Counter-Strike to play in his lifetime. Keep setting up tN1R, donk and sh1ro, and you would have a voice on the team who would be more composed and more capable of bringing fixes in during a half.
That’s another thing that’s impressive about Boombl4. If the initial plan goes wrong, he worked with B1ad3 before, but he doesn’t need B1ad3 now. He’s very self-sufficient at changing the style of calling, going for tempo changes, and he’s a great mid-rounder. He’s still a very strong mid-rounder for BetBoom.
With ENCE, EG and perhaps even Complexity disappearing from the scene, is Counter-Strike facing a temporary financial correction, or is there a more fundamental problem with the business model?
I would say this is a market correction, with some organisations that were definitely overpaying salaries for what they were getting in return. It’s unfortunate that we’re losing organisations that would pay players salaries, which would give new players something to aspire to in terms of joining those teams.
The finances of Counter-Strike just don’t work out right now. If you want to pay five guys and a coach, and everybody’s making, say, $20,000 a month, you’re never going to get that money back over a year with how stickers are right now. Over the course of the year, that would be about $1.4 million. With the latest figures coming out that stickers have been paying people around $75,000 or so, it’s not even close.
If you’re going to spend that much on salaries, you’re really going to have to win probably two or three S-tier events to even have a chance to get your money back. Even the PGL Bucharest event right now, which has a $1.25 million prize pool, the club share you get for first place is $225,000. On this hypothetical lineup of people making $20,000 salaries, which wasn’t even an unreasonable figure a handful of years ago, you’re only making back one-sixth of that. The maths isn’t even close to working out.
