AWPgust: MSL, the man who shook Astralis during their era

At first, we just needed a stand-in for Dreamhack Stockholm and we felt there was no real good AWP option. valde had suggested niko, but I said that I could try to AWP this event and we could see how it goes. Fourteen days later we won the event.

Obviously afterwards I stuck with it, because I felt that I could perform much better individually and set up the team and myself in a way that wasn’t possible when I was rifling. Sadly, I was kicked after the major and since then I didn’t have a team where I felt that I could trust everyone and focus on myself more as I could with our DH winning lineup. It probably would have been better to go back to rifling earlier than I did.

I think the main challenge I faced as a AWPer is the pressure, especially when you are also IGLing. It’s the two most important and impactful roles and it’s a lot of responsibility and pressure, which can be hard to handle, especially if it’s not going the right way or you can’t trust everyone within the team.

I do think AWPing is easier in some ways, it’s easier to get more kills than with a rifle. In other ways, it’s harder because of the pressure. You can look very bad after failing a few shots.

I do think nowadays it’s harder to be an aggressive AWPer because teams are so good at using utility and punishing the OP peeks. This is also why you see a meta right now where AWPers are a lot more passive, letting the riflers have first contact and playing off the information to close out clutches.

It’s a good question. I’m not sure it changed how I thought as an IGL, but I think it changed how I thought about myself as an individual player, it allowed me to think a lot more about myself and how to set myself up.

I was so used to thinking so much about the team and running in first and just doing what was best for everyone else. So for sure, it made me a much better individual player and I also think that today I’m much better individually as a rifler because of that.

I will say that when you're an AWPer, it’s easier sometimes to have the overview if you are playing more passive and see what is needed and make the right play individually which in the end will turn to probably a good call.

At the same time, there is also times, where you need to focus on your crosshair as AWPer, but because you need to look at radar if people are not talking good enough and you need to make calls and micromanage, you can miss shots because you're focused on helping teammates or making the right call, this was probably the biggest negative. There is both bad and good.

Sure, we had a fourteen day bootcamp as I remember with niko before Stockholm. We were terrible at the bootcamp, we got smashed, but we got to practise all our stuff and I felt we got to make sure we all understood the system, so it didn't matter for me about the results because a lot of the teams just ran around and didn’t get the same out of it.

I remember we beat TYLOO and Astralis in the Group Stage. It felt great and it was obviously a big confidence boost for everyone to beat Astralis, because this was during their era.

Going into the playoffs there was just a good mood in the team and we destroyed NaVi in the quarter finals quite comfortably. MOUZ was another story, we lost 0-16 on Dust2 on the first map, but we had a very good team spirit and just said let's move on and not think about it and we made jokes and honestly felt very good going into the last two maps. It was two very close maps, but in the end we took it home.

It was crazy on us emotionally, especially also because we had very little time to reset before we had to play the final versus Astralis.

I remember sitting backstage and ave going through stuff on Astralis and I was completely drained of energy because I had just given everything I had, but I also knew that I just had to save up my last energy and give everything I had in the final and I did.

We talked a lot about that we hoped they would pick Dust2, because their Dust2 wasn’t great, but they could maybe consider picking it because of our 0-16 loss and they had a map we felt they could beat us on quite easily.

So they picked Dust2 and we just destroyed them. 14-1 on the T side and I was just calling momentum calls, some calls I had never made before, and I was just feeling every round what was the perfect call and it worked.

After that, we lost on our map pick, Train, and the last map was Overpass. We scraped six rounds together on the CT side, mainly because of multikills from me.

Honestly, we were playing poorly on the CT side and it was very important we got the T round pistol and I again got in the zone and made a lot of good calls.

We had problems in the end with our A default, so I called a B rush at 14-11 and we won, afterwards valde was like “maybe do it again?”, ave said “No, they have bad money” and I said “let's rush B” and in the end we won a crazy round and it was crazy to beat Astralis in their era after 14 days on the AWP.

During the match I would say that I felt that device felt very uncomfortable, I had watched so many demos of him and in general, Astralis, so I knew every move and during the game I could just feel where they were on the map, especially on Overpass. It almost felt like a radarhack during that game.

I felt that I was in his head and he felt countered, so just overall a insane feeling and also insane to get the MVP, after having played rifle for so long and having “bad stats” from the outside, it was insane feeling.