Chr1zN: "It's really nice that nicoodoz can rifle and not be a burden"
OG will enter the BLAST.tv Austin Major as one of the most exciting teams in the entire competition.
Led by former MOUZ NXT man, Chr1zN, OG have shot up the rankings in 2025, and have a deep map pool that will allow them to be a threat for whichever team they may come up against.
Ahead of the team's entrance into the Major in Stage 1, we sat down with Chr1zN to discuss the team's journey this year, the addition of nicoodoz, and why OG made the decision to not play Train.
"A lot of our recent success comes from the fact we have a strong map pool"
It's been a long road for OG so far in 2025, how have you been finding it?
It's been going pretty well so far, we started off getting spooke onto the team officially and then nicoodoz joined and it's been going great.
I think, especially after the addition of nicoodoz, we really took our game to a new level, and, of course, that also brought us to the Major, which we're really excited about and was the goal since the beginning.
I'm really happy that we made it, all the VRS grinding has paid off.
Let's talk about nicoodoz, he's quite an experienced player who only recently joined in an official capacity, what has he brought to the team?
He's brought experience as you say, he's played for a lot of experienced teams at a very high level and a lot of Majors, too. Some of us can't say that, including myself.
He brings a calm atmosphere, and that helps a lot of us focus on performing better because he takes a lot of weight off our shoulders, which is really nice.
Also, his playstyle is really well implemented into the way that I see things, so I can help him a lot with my calling and it gets the best out of both of us.
Photo: OGYou mentioned his playstyle there, there's always been a lot said about his tendency to rifle, how has incorporating that into the system been?
For me, a lot of the time, when it comes to AWPers that want to rifle, it can be a mistake. It's very hard to be a really great AWPer as well as a good rifler, but in the case of nicoodoz, he really is a good hybrid.
Therefore, it makes sense for us to let him rifle a lot of the time, he's very good with it. Especially on our T sides, there's a lot of times where I get the most out of having five rifles, so it's really nice that nicoodoz can give me that and not be a burden in that sense, he can still contribute as much as any other star rifler would.
That's the big difference, he's very good with both, so I can make faster calls and build on momentum we have rather than having to take an AWP into account.
You guys qualified to Austin from the MRQ with a 3-0 record, did you expect that kind of result when you went into it?
It was hard to say what the expectation for what our record would be. Me personally, I knew that we would have a very good chance to make it through, and everyone else agreed going into it that it didn't matter how we did that.
Of course, we're really happy that we did it 3-0, it's not always easy, but it wasn't something that was discussed or a goal. I'm just excited that we made it here and did it in this way.
Do you think that the 3-0 record has raised expectations at all for your performances in the actual Major?
I think we knew from the beginning that we saw ourselves as a very strong team and a big competitor for one of the spots in the MRQ.
Now that we're at the Major, we just want to go as far as possible, and I think for all of us we really want to at least get out of the first stage. The expectation is to go through, so we'll be pretty devastated if that isn't the case, but from there, it just has to be game by game.
It's the Major, it's a new experience for the majority of us, and we have to be realistic and build upon the experience we'll get in it.
The last time we spoke before the beginning of the 2025 season, you mentioned Train a few times and your hopes of becoming a solid Train team, as the year has gone on, it's actually become your perma ban, what happened there?
I think we figured out quite quickly that a lot of teams were picking it up and therefore we decided that if we weren't going to make it our best map, we may as well just ban it and focus on being as strong on the rest of the maps.
I think that a lot of our recent success comes from the fact we have a strong map pool, so I think it was a good choice from us to not try to bring it in as soon as possible. It gave us time to fix all of the mistakes we had on other maps.
We can always see if we want to lean into it in the future.
Photo: OGYour map pool is very strong, you have high win rates on a lot of maps, but teams who are normally around where you are in the rankings have one map that they really stand out on that they can then use to punish pick when they're underdogs, do you think it's a bigger strength that you don't seem to have that and instead have the depth within your pool?
I think, for a while, that map was Ancient, and it still is a very strong map for us. But, because we were so good on it, it gave us time to focus our attention to build on our other maps, and now we have a really good record on most of the maps.
It does give us a big advantage in vetoes, a lot of teams, especially in more recent times, it can be hard to know what they're going to pick, so to be able to go out there and be harder to prepare for is something me and Lambert (OG's coach) have worked towards.
You have a relatively difficult opening game at the Major in Complexity, how are you feeling about them as an opponent?
As you say, they're in good form and a strong opponent regardless. They're one of the strongest teams in the stage, so we really want to beat them to make it easier on ourselves.
But, as I've seen at least, they're playing with a stand-in. We'll have to see if that's going to be a bonus for us, or if it's something that will work out for them, but either way, it'll be a really good match up and I'm just looking forward to getting to play against a big team like them.
Looking past the Major, it can do so much in terms of the rankings and getting invites to more LANs, if getting there was the goal for the first half of the year, what's the goal for the second half of the year?
For us as a team, it's to take the next step and get into the range of getting more tier one invites. We want to play a lot more LAN, right now, we've been playing a lot of online tournaments, which is also really nice, but we definitely want to see ourselves starting to get more of these experiences and get comfortable for when 2025 ends to look good into 2026.
