dennis: "I'm pretty free, Astralis just told me to do what I like"

Astralis found themselves in a tough situation after Nicolai "⁠device⁠" Reedtz's health issues forced the team to find a stand-in last-minute. That stand-in ended up being Dennis "⁠dennis⁠" Edman, who was placed on the bench in GODSENT less than two weeks ago.

Aside from the tie against North, Astralis cruised to the grand final in Copenhagen with ease

We interviewed the Swede about when he got approached by Astralis and found out why he believes the team is working well together in spite of the circumstances. dennis also touched on what happened with GODSENT, the format of BLAST Pro Series and last night's issues at the venue.

We should start with you even got together with Astralis last-minute, how did you get approached?

Actually, I didn't even expect them to ask me, I have no idea how I found out, I think I talked to someone in RFRSH and they said they were thinking about asking me, so I wrote to dupreeh and said that I was up for it. And here we are.

Considering your situation with GODSENT, you must be glad to play a top-tier event again...

No, I've been very demotivated, GODSENT wasn't really what I thought it was going to be. It's really hard to go from the top level to kind of the lowest level of Counter-Strike. There's some really nice guys, some really good players, but we just didn't click together. It was not a good fit, some players wanted to play the same roles, I couldn't find my own role, so I struggled a lot. That's why it's pretty easy to play with people like in Astralis, they are such good players, I can do kind of whatever I want, I'm pretty free, they just told me to do what I like. They welcomed me pretty well, we practiced for three days and we're in the final. It's working out pretty well.

It is working out well, three one-sided matches plus the tie with North, you had a couple of really good games individually, how does it work without device who is normally the star AWPer being there and yet the team is working well together...?

dupreeh has been AWPing since I started practicing with them and he's been doing a very good job, actually, he's really good with the AWP, I'm surprised that he doesn't play it more often.

The format here is very different to what we've really ever seen before, what do you think about having all three teams playing at the same time in front of the crowd, how is it from a team's point of view?

I think this is kind of fun because it's a new thing. You play five maps and whoever is best gets to the final and that's fair, so I think it's a good thing to try out.

Touching on yesterday's issues, do you have anything to say about what happened last night, how it affected you?

We knew that this wasn't a problem someone caused, it was a network error or something like that so it couldn't be fixed. You can't really do much if the internet or network isn't working as it's supposed to, it was no one's fault and they fixed it for today and everything has been running smooth. They didn't sleep at all as far as I know, they did a good job and it was just unfortunate. BLAST is probably, with the exception of yesterday, one of the best events I've attended.