Friberg during the Pantamera tournament. Photo: Tobias Lundberg

Ninjas in Pyjamas have been eliminated from Pantamera CS:GO Challenge, the first big LAN on Swedish soil this year. After the success in Finland and the victory in Asus Rog 2015, the Swedes left Inferno Online with disappointed faces. Now the team venture into a few weeks of intence practice.
– You are not supposed to receive this kind of a wake up call during important tournaments, Adam ”friberg” Friberg tells Aftonbladet Esports.

Ninjas in Pyjamas came to Inferno Online in central Stockholm as one of the big favorites in the Pantamera crowdfunded tournament. In the first LAN on home soil this year, the expectations were enormous on the Swedish side, but they were even bigger within the NiP squad.
– We had high hopes coming in to this tournament. We played well in Finland last week and felt like ’we are up and rolling again’. Adam ”friberg” Friberg tells Aftonbladet Esport and continued:
– However, when we’ve been playing this past week we haven’t felt 100 percent. It’s been going good, but not perfect. The different parts just didn’t fall in place during this tourney.

You mention that it didn’t feel 100 percent. What was that didn’t really work, can you put your finger on what didn’t feel perfect?

– I believe that our T side works really well right now. We put down a lot of hours on it since we have new player in the team – who’s obviously not very new anymore. Our CT side have been less impressive lately and that comes down to bad communication that leads to weird rotations.

In a lot of peoples eyes, Inferno Online is the home ground of Ninjas in Pyjamas. It’s the place where the Swedes ought to show their brilliance. But they’ve fallen short in the last two LAN’s at the internet café in the central parts of Stockholm, and once again they busted out during the group stage.
– We are not a very good team when it comes to group stages or best-of-1. It’s a rare occation to see us advancce with a perfect record basically because BO1 are so random. I believe that CS should not be played best-of-1, Counter-Strike should be decided by the team that can win over three maps. It’s in those matches we are at our best, friberg says and continues:
– We feel very confident if we move on to the playoffs. But in BO1 there’s to much randomness in this system, and if you lose both pistol rounds you fall too far back to dig yourself out of your problems.

What is the next step for NiP?

– Before Katowice there will be a bunch of online leagues starting, but there’s no more LAN’s prior to the major. We will be in hardcore practice mode, and we noticed fairly quickly what we need to fix when we are in that mode, the famous says and continues:
– We will go home, sitt down and watch the games we just played to find what we did wrong. Perhaps we need to invent some new stuff and come up with a bunch of new ideas. We’ll be analyzing a lot.

How much time do you guys put on analysis?

– We put a lot of effort on walk throughs and we analyze almost everything. For example we will watch our game against Fnatic for maybe an hour and then we’ll jump into the server and try out our new stuff. After that we play all night on that map and just practice.

When you guys talked after the game you mentioned the bad results you had during pistol rounds. What went wrong in those?

– We didn’t win many pistol rounds during this event. I believe we might have won almost 70 percent of those in Finland, while we didn’t win more than 25 percent of those here and they are so extremely important. They decide the momentum of the game even tough you might put up a good half.