Copenhagen Flames: "None of us had ever thought that our expectation was to get to the Major"

As Copenhagen Flames look to secure their first-ever Major attendance, the players and the organization's co-owner spoke about their upset run at IEM Fall so far.

Copenhagen Flames have had a fantastic run at IEM Fall so far, taking everyone by surprise in a group stacked with familiar and much more experienced names. The Danes went undefeated in the round robin group stage, beating G2, BIG, MOUZ, FunPlus Phoenix, and AURA on the way to the playoffs, at the very least earning a chance to qualify for PGL Major Stockholm.

Only one result separates them from their first-ever Major attendance now, as the team could secure their spot even before the playoffs begin in the case that BIG beat FaZe to ninth place at IEM Fall. Otherwise, they'd need at least one victory in the playoffs or in the 5th-8th decider bracket, with Copenhagen Flames set to take on their biggest challenge yet in a quarter-final matchup against Vitality on Thursday.

As they were eagerly awaiting to see whether they'll still need to fight for the Major spot, the whole squad attended a press conference ahead of the IEM Fall Europe playoffs to talk about their upset run and the possibility of attending the biggest tournament CS:GO has to offer.

The team and the organization's co-owner, Daniel Vorborg, also discussed the contributions of Faruk "⁠pita⁠" Pita to their recent successes after the former Ninjas in Pyjamas member was brought in as the new coach in August. pita has not been able to fulfill his role with the team at IEM Fall as he is serving a ban for the next three Majors as one of the coaches banned for exploiting the coaching bug, but he has been working behind the scenes to prepare the Flames for the RMR tournament.

I wanted to ask about your steady rise since the new rosters was put together. What do you think have been the main factors behind that success?

Fredrik "⁠roeJ⁠" Jørgensen: I'm actually not sure. We've only been together four months, I don't think any of us expected us to compete at this level so fast. I just think we fit really well in-game and also out of the game, we have a really good worth ethic, everyone has the same goals, we all want to become really good and we work hard for it.

Daniel Vorborg: From my perspective, we've been through a lot of iterations of roster in Copenhagen Flames, having sold a lot of players and also rebuilding a couple of times. But with this particular lineup, I had already worked with HooXi and roeJ for a long period of time before they came back, so I knew how they want to work. I also worked with jabbi and nicoodoz for quite a while before we created this, and Zyphon was the only guy I didn't work with for close to a year that I worked with the other four players. So I think it was easy to quickly get on the same page, whereas that might for other rosters we've built take like three months before we agree on how things should work and how we should work together and how we want to achieve our goals. I think that was very easy and natural with this roster because we already had some of the same ideas of how to get things done.

Has it been as much of a surprise to you as everyone else and have this kind of run this early into the roster?

roeJ: Yeah, I think it is for everyone, to be honest (laughs).

Vorborg: We talked about expectations — we don't like to set that we need to be this rank by this time, but it's nice sometimes to talk about ranking to have a ballpark for everyone. We said that our goals were that by the end of the year we wanted to challenge for top 20 and we talked about that six weeks ago, and now we're in the top 20 after six weeks, so obviously we didn't expect things to go that fast. But we did expect with time that we could get to where we are now.

Rasmus "⁠HooXi⁠" Nielsen: Even though we maybe didn't expect it, we always knew we had the level to compete with this level of competition, and obviously if we're playing really well then things like this can happen.

You added pita to the roster about a month and a half ago. I understand that he wasn't able to fulfill the coaching role at this event, at least not in a full capacity, but can you speak to his contributions to the team's rise?

nicoodoz: For me, pita has helped me a lot with a lot of small and simple stuff that I've been messing up and even small aspects of the game that I've never really thought about. It's been helping me a lot to put myself in better situations and just playing better overall, and also it's helped me with my personal consistency.

Vorborg: There's also a lot of our players that aren't that experienced on LAN, and I think leading up to this event pita has talked a lot about different things that we can do to get into good routines, make things a bit easier for ourselves, and make people a bit more comfortable just day to day. He's of course been at many LANs and he's made many mistakes in terms of how you adapt to schedules at tournaments, and I think a lot of the things that he's brought to the table has helped us a lot there, as well.

This would be the first time that the organization attends a Major. You were talking about not being able to keep up with player salaries sometimes as the team improves, but a Major attendance can attract some sponsorships and opportunities to scale up. How important would it be for the organization to have a spot at the Major?

Vorborg: That would obviously be massive in so many different ways. One is of course as you say sponsors, it's going to be more attractive for them to be on the team. It might be hard, though, to close sponsorship deals given we have like maybe 20 days from when we qualify to the actual Major, but of course that's the job of myself and everyone in the organization, that we need to capitalize on this as fast as possible.

Our dream is not to keep producing talent and then selling them to other organizations, we of course also dream of attending Majors, winning Majors, winning championships, competing with the best in the world. It's the only path forward right now for us to keep doing more with less and then stretch that as far as we can. Sometimes that's going to mean that we're going to be selling teams, but then we'll have more capital for the next rebuild, and the next rebuild, and the next rebuild.

On top of just the business side it would also just be a huge dream to have our club immortalized in the game with a sticker, it would just mean so much to us, both on a business level but also just the personal level, and a huge accomplishment for the club all around.

What about the players, as none of you have made it to a Major before, what would it mean to compete at the biggest stage?

jabbi: I think it would be pretty sick. I don't think any one of us had ever thought when we went to this LAN that our expectation was to get enough points to get to the Major, so I think it would be just unreal. We talked about getting 2 wins in the group and that it would be a decent event, so it's pretty sick to think about, I would say.

Rasmus "⁠Zyphon⁠" Nordfoss: I didn't even know this was an RMR event before we got to the event. (laughs) That's the honest truth. And then we got here and suddenly we can qualify to the Major. I'm like 'okay, that's nice.' So, it feels pretty sick and feels pretty nice. That's all I can say. It's unimaginable.

HooXi: The whole thing about being immortalized in the game, having your own sticker, I feel like that's probably a dream for every single player who plays this game, and it has at least been my dream basically forever ever since CS:GO came out. I don't think I can describe the feeling of what it would mean before I'm actually there, but it would definitely be huge, there's no question about that.