Anders: "Heroic's road for recovery is a hard one"
Anders Blume is one of Counter-Strike's most iconic voices and faces. And some would argue that he is also a bit of a genius too.
The master of the simulation, Anders will once again be lending his voice to use for BLAST Premier Fall Final 2023, so we thought it was a perfect opportunity to get his thoughts on the current state of the Counter-Strike scene.
Photo: Stephanie LindgrenWith all the recent changes to teams, which team are you most excited about the future of?
In a way I'm really excited for Boombl4 to return, he had such a strange style of counter-strike and I kind of what to see his redemption.
Are there any you think may take a while to get going and be contenders?
Even though it's already been a while, the C9 team should really be able to do something, I still have hopes that it will.
What’s your take on the Astralis/Heroic drama? Can the potential changes take Astralis back to the top?
Honestly at this point, particularly early on in CS2, I reckon so much comes down to player dedication: How much do you love this new game? Do you believe in the project? Can you stay motivated through all the drama? Hard to know, but I do know this, the core of device and blameF, to me, is rock solid.
What about Heroic? How do they come back from losing three key players?
Honestly, I doubt if they can. It's always interesting to see because when this kind of thing happens, you sometimes see a new side of players you thought you knew inside the server. I think the road to recovery for Heroic is a hard one.
It seems like they may have to delve deeper down into the Danish scene to remain a national team; do you think there is still the talent there for them to remain a top team?
I actually have no doubt whatsoever that the talent is out there, but discovering it and training those people properly remains a really hard problem to solve.
Photo: João FerreiraHow about other national teams? There’s been a lot of talk about fnatic potentially becoming Swedish again after recent changes; do you think Sweden is back in a position to have a top team with its current talent pool?
I honestly don't understand what our Swedish brothers are doing at the moment, Sweden in my mind is the original Counter-Strike nation, that's how I remember them. I'm convinced we have to make fun of them as much as possible until they remember that fact themselves.
What are your thoughts on national teams overall? Do you think CS suffers from having fewer national teams?
I think the overall level of the teams has massively improved over the all-national team era of CS, but the problem is, I think the teams as a whole get a lot less fan support, they lose a lot of their identity.