cxzi on NA: "I think that practice, in scrims, is kind of useless sometimes."

Dust2.us' Dafydd Gwynn was able to sit down with Danny "cxzi" Strzelczyk shortly after Nouns' 16-2- thrashing of Infinity at the IEM Road to Rio Americas RMR. The pair touched on the side's second-round victory over the Latin American squad, how it feels to have the backing of the North American community, and the state of NA Counter-Strike as a whole.

You dominated on the CT-side to start off, what does a win like this do for your confidence?

I think we were pretty confident going into it, we didn't really prep or anything like that against Infinity. We didn't really know what they banned, like we only knew they banned Vertigo so, we were just like "eh we'll see what happens and go off their bans."

With Nuke, we were just talking about how you haven't played too much of it with the map being your ban in ECL, how were you feeling playing it here?

Overall we didn't want to play it a lot of the time because everybody is pretty good at Nuke and picking it is not fun because you start T-side, so we just practised it over the bootcamp and practiced a bunch on other maps. We were just like "maybe we can include this in our map-pool."

For you personally, this team has been part of your redemption arc and recently when you beat Apeks at Fragadelphia 17 you could see the scene starting to get behind you. What is it like coming into this event having the scene behind you?

It's pretty cool, at Frag we had our high when we beat Apeks and then had our low not even making our groups, our group was the group of death though so, I mean oNe's been playing pretty good and we had to play Apeks a second time. Overall it's really good to have the community behind us, I feel like everybody really likes it. After there was a couple move changed, everybody really got behind us and when we didn't have the org to support us for the bootcamp you can just tell that everybody wanted to help.

What was it like to see all those people donating?

It was crazy, I didn't honestly think we were going to have that much and it was just great. Then Nouns messaged us literally right after we posted the tweet, and then even FalleN was going to help us out and everybody was behind us. It was actually insane.

It's likely you are going to have to play an SA team, is there any teams you would like to face?

I mean to be honest, overall I feel like MIBR plays more of a European style, they are a very slow style team so that could be better to play against them. But also paiN did not look that good against COL and paiN came off a win at Melbourne though so I really don't know who is the best team to play against but we will just play it by ear and just see who it comes out to be.

I was chatting to SEMPHIS earlier and he was saying that as a coach his job isn't just to help you guys in the server but to help you outside of the server as well. How much has he impacted you in both regards?

I think for the most part we have a lot of good things that we do in-game and have a lot of solid stuff, but it's more when things go wrong people, including myself, kind of shut down sometimes and get upset or don't want to try as hard. The mood goes down. He does a really good job of trying to keep the vibes good and honestly get us out of that bubble.

What are your goals as a roster?

We all came with the intention of making it 3-2, or 3-1, or whatever it is. We want to make it out to at least the Challengers Stage, we feel like we have a pretty good chance. I mean we planned on winning against EG, but that went sideways. But overall we feel like we had a pretty good chance going into this whole event.

You were talking about the community being behind you, there's always been that one tier-two team in NA that is able to bridge the gap, go to the RMR and go to Pro League. It was PA for a while, Bad News Bears too, and Extra Salt a while ago. Do you think you guys are ready to be that team now?

I think so, obviously, the difference between like us and COL is that they have a lot more support. Even PA now, the teams that would go the events, they have already had their practice and now we are getting our practice time in EU and having the chance to play against these better teams. Honestly, over practice, they are just scrims, but a lot of the stuff we do actually is good enough to play against tier one Europeans sometimes but it's just overall scrims so I mean who really knows how impactful it is?

Would you say there is anybody here you have a rivalry with, even if it's just a friendly rivalry?

EG was the team I wanted to really beat because I subbed with Jonji and Tim [autimatic] was on the team, he's the one that kind of gave me my chance in the scene and I feel like that would have been a really cool arc to win that match. Overall I don't really care about beating anybody else, I just want to make it out.

What is your overall opinion on the state of NA CS right now?

I think that everybody plays scrims differently. When we play these NA teams [in scrims] and people do these things that just don't make sense, even though we do it sometimes too, I mean it just kind of depends on the mood. I think that practice, in scrims, is kind of useless sometimes.

I remember a long time ago when Bad News Bears with ptr came up and they just didn't really scrim that much, they just talked about things in the server and have these set reactions and they ended up performing better overall. They would play scrims sometimes but they would just talk a lot about the game and try to figure out things, like "if this happens we should do this" because playing scrims in NA is not the best unless you are playing against Liquid, or COL, or FURIA I guess you could say.

Everybody just kind of plays loose, when you play in a match or an official that's important everybody is different. They are just doing things that normally wouldn't work the best, and that's the main issue with NA.

Nouns currently sit middle-of-the-pack at the Regional Major Ranking event, with their next game set to be versus paiN at 07:30AM on Thursday.