Snappi: "Here to get experience"

HEROIC kicked off IEM Katowice with an upset win against North on Nuke in overtime before losing two one-sided matches to Cloud9 and SK.

Marco "⁠Snappi⁠" Pfeiffer gave us his thoughts on all of HEROIC's matches, as well as the last two that they have coming up, and shared what goals they set for themselves for the next few months:

Let's start off with the addition of JUGi, tell me about what you saw in him that made you acquire him from Tricked.

niko played with him before in Tricked and he told us about him, MODDII played with him a couple of years ago as well. While k0nfig, Magisk, valde, niko, Kjaerbye, all of those guys were picked up, the biggest talent was probably JUGi, but he fucked up his chance once. But now he's 100% focused to take it, I believe. I think when he gets more experienced, he's gonna be one of the best AWPers in the world.

Coming into IEM Katowice fresh off a lineup change, what goals have you set for yourselves?

We're here to get experience, basically. If we can get the two last wins then it would be great for us, but we also gotta just admit that we haven't had any practice at all. We added JUGi last Monday and we had officials every single day, at least a BO3 and some days all day because of the ECS qualifier. So we basically had zero time to adjust and get JUGi into the tactics, so we just gotta see this as an experience and that every win is a win.

Considering you didn't really have any practice, how do you think you managed to defeat North on Nuke?

I don't believe North is a good Nuke team to be honest. I know everyone says so, but when I watched them, I feel like the only really good Nuke team is Virtus.pro, I don't feel like anyone else is like god-tier on Nuke, so if we get a chance to play Nuke, we will take it every time.

You talked about getting those last two wins, what do you think it would take for you to get there?

I believe we made a mistake against SK to go on Mirage, people lost confidence in our Cobble because we got quite a big loss to Cloud9, but I also think it was a mistake that I didn't say "No, let's ban Mirage", but that's just how it ended. People lost confidence and that's why we ended on Mirage, which was a mistake. We lost both pistol rounds against Cloud9 and got behind far on both the T and CT side and I think you gotta have that in mind for the next game. We shouldn't be so scared of Cobble, which we did against SK.

We already explored the expectations and goals you have for this event, but what are they in the long term? Where do you see yourselves in a few months time?

Our goal is to be top 10 before summer. I hope we will finally get to practice, we haven't been able to practice well since we sold gla1ve. So I hope we get to have like a month of straight practice where everyone gets comfortable in their roles, because right now that's certainly not the case. We play with old strats, with old setups, we really need to rethink the way we play and also we got niko, who is much better than gla1ve, and we also got JUGi, who is a better AWPer than Friis. So we probably need to utilize them more and some of the new players need to get more responsibility in-game. If we get like a month to fix that, I hope we can progress further up the ranking.

Do you think there's enough space for the teams that don't get invited to get into events? Is it going to be hard to get into that higher tier?

I believe it's a misconception that when you're on top, it's hard to stay there, because everyone gets invited when they're on top, so basically some teams have screwed up in group stages like 60, 70% of the time but because they get through one or two times, they stay in the top eight because they get invited into the tournaments. If you're actually in the top eight, it's a lot easier to stay there than it is for a team like Gambit to get where they are now. So I believe the ranking is good and bad, but sometimes there are too many invites, and I believe more teams should go through the closed qualifiers, to be honest.