BIG may have been absent from many of the LANs in the second half of 2023, but their young team is ready to have a big year in 2024.
With players like s1n and prosus now fully integrated into the team and tier one and Krimbo and mantuu both shining, tabseN has a capable unit behind him capable of taking BIG far.
Before Spring Groups, we spoke to tabseN about the IGL situation in BIG, enjoying Counter-Strike, and the team's goals for 2024.
There was some confusion a while back regarding whether it was s1n or yourself in the IGL role, has that changed at all?
No, we changed it back. We gave it a try with s1n and we had the belief that it might be helpful for him and for me as a player to put the most potential out there. After some games, we realised that it's just not the case and we need to be on the same page, be willing to play less comfortable positions, and we changed it back which felt better for sure.
Do you think it could ever change in the future and s1n will take over?
Never say never, but at the moment there's no concrete plan or discussion about it. We have two candidates who are able and willing to be in-game leader or lead the team in general, but right now we have nothing planned.
In terms of the time when you wasn't IGLing, what was that like for you? You used to be the big star of the team and then became the IGL, what's it like making the transition between the two roles?
Honestly, it has the same pressure as being the star player. You have the responsibility to perform, either being the star in the server and being the best or doing your job as the leader of the team and being able to create a system and plan that wins you games.
It felt rough at the start to be able to play at a good level and be able to concentrate and communicate on the overview stuff, but after some time I realised that I can make it work and I can also play my own game from time to time and put up good numbers.
I think it's a hard transition for everyone in the beginning when you change from a normal player without the responsibility to making calls and becoming responsible for them. If that's something you enjoy doing, winning or losing the game for your team, it's something you should definitely consider, but other than that I think it's a hard task.
How do you think IGLing has changed or developed you as a player?
I definitely think way more about the bigger picture now. I was always able to coordinate certain players in certain situations where I felt like we needed a voice, and I always felt like I needed to step up when that was the case and make the necessary calls, but developing as an in-game leader has also developed me as a person, it's made me calmer in situations and thinking about what can happen in many situations and scenarios has stopped me from being so short-sighted.
I'm grateful to have been able to go down this path with all these players, the staff members, the people who have been behind me and supporting me like they have been since the beginning.
You're one of the few players to have stuck by your national scene and also one of the few players to make the transition from star to IGL and actually stay in the role; a lot of people might say that you've wasted your best years as a result, what would you say to those people?
First of all, I appreciate the process of thinking about the game and the general situation. Furthermore, I'd like to say that it's my own decision based on my feelings about the situation and what will be best not only for myself, but also the people around me who I live with and work with day-by-day.
Also, being in the position to have the game in my own hands is something that not everyone can appreciate and feel how it needs to be done. I really enjoy being in the position to have this responsibility, it's on me if we play bad and I take that responsibility, if I make a bad call, if I'm calling bad, playing bad, if I put my players in a bad position it ends up on me and I take it. But at the same time, if I put my players in a good position and make a good call it's as amazing as if I'm getting 35 kills in a game.
I really love to be a team player and being an captain or IGL in Counter-Strike, you can't feel more appreciated than that if you make a good call. It's an ungrateful task to manage, but I'm grateful because it's also a really hard one to do, and as I said in the beginning, people might say I wasted my prime, but you never know when the prime is, especially in CS. Age doesn't matter, the priorities just need to be straight and we'll see how good anyone can be at any point. That's why I don't believe my prime is over yet, I still have it in me and I want to show myself and everyone else that I am capable of calling and playing at a really high level.
You mentioned the idea of enjoyment a few times then, and Counter-Strike is one of the rare things where players have turned something that was a hobby into a job, do you think the game becoming your job takes away from enjoyment or is that where you've made the career decisions you have to counteract that?
100%. To this day it doesn't feel like work, we have an office where we go to work but I can see everyone's faces when they come up to the office and I see the enjoyment of just being here and being around people. Having the day together and working from the same page where you want to achieve the same things and have the same beliefs and goals, it feels amazing to be in these shoes.
That's why, for me, one of the biggest things is enjoyment. Living in each day, living in the moment, with all the people that we've built this with, this is something not everyone can feel or achieve, that you've built something from the ground up and now we have an office and people working together, enjoying all the love and being together, and enjoying Counter-Strike especially. We are doing this because of Counter-Strike. Imagine a world where we do this because of a video game. Every time I think about it I'm just grateful to be on this journey and I hope it continues for many, many years.
Considering we've spoken about enjoyment, we have to ask: are you enjoying CS2 or do you wish you were still playing CS:GO?
To be fair, I really miss CS:GO. Performance-wise, how it felt to play the game, but I'm really excited for the journey with CS2. I feel like it can be really good and like it can overtake CS:GO in a way, but it needs tweaks here and there for sure.
I'm just looking forward to enjoying the challenge and what CS:GO meant to me is the same as many people, it changed our lives and we need to be patient. If someone changed your life, don't take it all for granted, give them time, hopefully they will be willing to listen to community feedback, and after that, I'm really excited to see what will go on the next few months and years.
Last year was a weird year for BIG, you had a rebuild in the middle of the year and some solid online results but probably didn't do as well as you would have liked to on LAN, how are you looking back on the year?
It was definitely a rollercoaster. I have mixed emotions, changing a lineup that had been together for almost four years and seeing that the goals and visions had disappeared in some way, it's a hard thing to realise. But things change, time goes on, and for me personally it was the best change we could've made, it put a huge fire into our team and we now have young guns who are willing to work their asses off like no one has before. They are playing for themselves and they are willing to enjoy the journey.
They aren't expecting to have success in the very beginning, and that's what I enjoy, I really enjoy the process and seeing how we evolve in the next days, weeks, months. If you see that change, that improvement, you know that you are doing something right and we also know we need to be patient and be in the right place at the right time. I believe that we will be there, we have the potential to do so, we really enjoy ourselves and like each other as a team. We have fun, we have the same humour, we enjoy working together every day for almost ten hours a day. We're preparing really hard for the next few months because there's tournaments where we can shine, it's a huge few months for us, and these moments can change our lives.
We all love the same game, we all love Counter-Strike, and as I say again, I'm just grateful to have these kind of people around me who are willing to approach it like I do.
You mentioned goals and how they might take some time, what are those long term ambitions?
One of the longest ambitions for me is to make the players feel comfortable and make sure they still believe in the project, that's the biggest personal challenge.
We have Krimbo, for example, one of the biggest young stars in the world. He's got a lot of interest from other teams and he still decided to play with us and to stick with us, that means for me personally, I need to be the one to make it work. I don't want him to regret it.
He's gone the same road that I have, he's stuck with BIG, stuck by the German scene, and I'm 100% sure that in the future he won't regret it and that's something I have on my hands and I want to make it work.
How are you feeling about Spring Groups?
I'm excited. It's been a long time since we've been at a LAN and it's now a new year, it feels like a time to begin again and start travelling from tournaments again and again. The biggest goal for me this year is to just enjoy it all, I want to enjoy the tournaments, enjoy being on the road, enjoy the challenges and even going from hotels to arenas and studios, everything that maybe in the past I didn't enjoy so much. I just want to share the positivity because there hasn't been much of that in world recently, and I've realised you only live once so you need to make the best out of it.
What about your group itself? You have Virtus.pro in your opening game and Cloud9 and Heroic are the other two teams in the group, how are you feeling about that?
Of course, it's a tough group but BLAST is always tough. It's the highest level of competition and you need to be able to perform at the highest level in the important moments.
To be fair, we rarely play against Virtus.pro or even practice against them. They have a really special style so I'm looking forward to seeing if we are able to adapt in the game or even before the game for this specific challenge.
I'm looking forward to playing against this level of competition, it's been a long time. We've been playing online for the last few months and it worked out for us, but LAN is different, people are built differently on LAN.
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