KSCERATO on HLTV's top 20: "I thought I deserved more"

At a press conference setting out the team's expectations and goals for 2023, FURIA star Kaike "KSCERATO" Cerato addressed his thoughts on last year and his individual form. KSCERATO finished the year in ninth on the HLTV top 20 list, and whilst it was an improvement of six on his placing the previous year, he felt he could have climbed even higher.

"The first semester wasn't very happy, there was something different, my decisions weren't going the right way, I wasn't comfortable playing my positions, but the second semester was flowers. The first was coffin, the second was flowers. I was satisfied, but I thought I deserved more, I wanted to be higher", he stated, referring to the HLTV Top 20 Players list.

"The Major MVP award was the missing piece for me to get into the top 5, maybe top 6, and I think it was in the little things. I don't think about individual awards, but it's great to be in the HLTV Top players and now I need to continue doing what I'm doing, helping the team the best I can and killing dummies"

KSCERATO's belief that the Major MVP award would have been enough to get him into the top five has some merit. If his FURIA side managed to overcome Heroic, and then won the Final, KSCERATO was nailed on for MVP as the second highest-rated player at the event behind Dmitry "sh1ro" Sokolov. Maybe this would have been enough for him to replace sh1ro's teammate Sergey "Ax1Le" Rykhtorov in the top five.

The FURIA riflers comments come from a press conference that covered a wide variety of topics, including the team's performance at Rio, their loss to Heroic in the semi-final, and their first tournament of the new campaign IEM Katowice. FURIA are having to start their Katowice run in the play-in stage, with their first opponents being Polish underdogs Permitta.