zont1x: "chopper wasn't motivated to dominate"
At 21, zont1x has a trophy cabinet that most professional players couldn’t dream of achieving throughout their entire career. Despite that, and despite having donk as the spearhead, he’s never been part of a Spirit team that actually dominated Counter-Strike in any meaningful way.
Now, at BLAST Open Porto, after winning gold at the Esports World Cup, Spirit are looking to string together consecutive trophy wins, with their first test coming against Falcons in the semi-finals.
At the event, we sat down with zont1x to discuss why Spirit have never been dominant, the motivations of his former IGL, and whether or not Spirit are the best team in the world right now.
“It’s not sustainable for us yet”
We're here at the BLAST Open Porto playoffs. You guys went straight through to the semis. What's the tournament been like so far?
Well, I would say pretty easy, but still I think we can play a lot better. This is certainly not the best performance from us, but still we managed to win those matches quite comfortably.
You won your last tournament, but throughout the few years since you and donk came into tier one with Spirit, you've maybe had difficulties winning back-to-back events. What do you think has stopped you guys from having that sustained dominance over a number of tournaments in a row?
We were still young; that's the first thing. Second thing: we had chopper, who is not really, I would say, that motivated to dominate the CS scene. He had certain goals, like winning a Major, for example. And because of those certain goals, it wasn’t like he didn't care, but he was not that motivated to win six tournaments in a row. It was not something where he was like, "yeah, I won that." So it was hard for us to have a stable performance over the month.
I saw that interview you did with Banks where you were talking about your own motivation, how it's not tied to tournaments; it's more just being the best version of yourself. Does that contrast with that? Because I guess the best version of yourself would just be winning every event regardless of what they are.
Yeah, I think so. I don't have a particular goal of winning a Major or anything else. I'm just trying to win as much as I can, and that's pretty much it. So yeah, I would say I have quite a different mentality when it comes to this. I think it's quite similar to what donk has, because he doesn't care either; he just wants to win as much as he can.
Was it maybe a little frustrating at the time, then, that chopper had these set goals for a Major, Cologne, whatever, and you just want to win everything? How did you react to that at the time?
People are different. It's not that big of a problem, I would say. Because he wanted to win a Major or Cologne, and we were in the best shape in Cologne or the Major. Because I'm, like, 21 years old, and I have won a Major, Cologne and Katowice. I achieved everything with chopper and the team. So maybe he is the reason, and his big performance at those exact championships is the reason that I managed - we managed - to win those championships that fast. People are different. It's not a big problem.
Because we've been talking about dominance; you said that you don't feel like the team is playing as well as they can. Do you feel like that might hold you back from doing it this time? Would you still say right now is a good opportunity to actually win consecutive events?
In order to win, for example, five championships in a row, you have to be able to not only hold your shape - individual or team shape - but you always have to progress. Because as soon as you take the top spot, everyone starts to look at your game, and you have to evolve all the time. So I would say even though we are not, in my opinion, playing the best Counter-Strike we can at the moment, it's still about us being able to not lose motivation and still progress.
A lot of the other teams all seem to be saying that you guys are the best team in the world right now. Does it feel like that to you guys?
zont1x: I would say we don't have that sustainable performance, and we don't have those significant results yet. Even though, if you look at our last five or six championships and take the average place, we are probably by far the best team in those statistics, I would say.
But even in this case, if you talk about the last month: we lost to JiJieHao, we had a close game with BIG, we lost to MOUZ; it's not that sustainable for us yet. So yeah, I think if we win this tournament, you could say that we are the best team. But then we have one month of not playing championships.
So when we come to Katowice, would we still be able to say that we are the best team? We will have to regain shape, we will have to play again, and teams will adapt to us in that month - we will be away for the whole of September. So yeah, there's nothing that sustainable yet. We are not Vitality, we haven't won the last six championships, to talk about the best team.
Over the Summer, there was constant conversation about your guys' coaching situation, and you're now working with both hally and S0tF1k. Now you've had a couple of months of this season; are you starting to feel the benefits of it? How has it changed the team and the way you guys operate?
I think the main person who benefits from it is hally himself, because he has much more energy and time to do something in particular and do it with full energy.
I think that S0tF1k just helps; he's taking a part of the job that hally was doing before, and now hally has more energy to do whatever he has to do, and do it the best, with full energy. I think that's the thing we had to do a long time ago, because if you look at other teams, you can see that all of them have, like, an analyst, second coach, main coach and whatever. There's a lot of staff in the organisation that splits whatever they have to do. So yeah, I think it benefits us, obviously.
