Snappi jokes about ENCE's style: "We like to say 'if rushing doesn't work, rush faster'"

Snappi sat down with HLTV to talk about ENCE's win over fnatic, the structure and style of the team, and his issues with the BLAST qualification system.

ENCE have been on a solid upward trajectory in the past year or so, ever since the collapse of the Finnish roster. Under the guidance of Eetu "⁠sAw⁠" Saha and Marco "⁠Snappi⁠" Pfeiffer the roster forced their way back into the consciousness of tier-one CS, made the Legends Stage of the last Major, and have now made three back-to-back appearances in the ESL Pro League playoffs.

With a convincing victory in the first round in Düsseldorf under his belt, Snappi sat down with HLTV to discuss how they were able to beat fnatic, how and why the Pavle "⁠Maden⁠" Bošković transfer came about, and why he has problems with the way BLAST run their open qualification system.

Congratulations, must feel good to go deep in Pro League for the third time in a row, how do you feel?

We are feeling good. This first match was probably the toughest, because obviously after the group stage you are coming back, are you in the same form as you were in the group stage, right? I think in the group stage we played some amazing CS, we could even have come first I think, with some luck.

It feels good to be back, I think we can make a deeper run than the other two. I think in the first one we got top 12, the second one top 8, so we are now looking to improve that.

You must have been pretty pleased to see the veto, with all three maps being very comfortable ones for your team. Do you think fnatic might have underestimated your Overpass?

No I don’t think so, but they didn’t have many choices to be honest, I don’t think they could go anywhere else. We knew they were going to pick Overpass, they 100% knew we were going to pick Nuke, and then I think we both knew it was going to be Mirage as a decider, there weren’t any surprises, both teams knew what the maps were going to be. It was three comfortable maps for both teams, maybe not so much Nuke for them, but they actually played it pretty good, especially on CT. I don’t think they underestimated us, I just think they didn’t have any other options.

Speaking of Nuke, were you maybe expecting a bigger T half on that map, considering your great T-side win rate on it this year and the 3-0 start?

Yeah, I didn’t call too good. I think there were a few things, first of all in the first weapon round I think we had a double entry and then somehow we started dying to mezii from door or something like this. After that round they started shutting us down, and maybe we relied a bit too much on our counter. Obviously against some teams you can do it, but maybe it wasn’t the best thing to rely so much on it against a team like fnatic who have some new players and might change things up; They don’t really have as set routines as us or other teams.

So we got off on the wrong foot, I think it was like 7 or 8-3 before we starting getting into it, I think then we had a three-on-one and a three-on-two that we definitely should have won both of, so we only got four rounds. So I didn’t really call a good T Nuke, and then we also blew the chances we had, there were at least three rounds we probably should have converted. It is what it is, they also played really solid and as I said on the stream, mezii is an amazing player, he was really good at roaming around the door area and surprising us.

You followed that up with an amazing CT side, how did you manage to shut them down so convincingly?

I think we had a prac against fnatic some time ago where they kept throwing fast yard smokes, and they destroyed us. I remember thinking that it maybe isn’t the best idea, because it might work in prac but as soon as we go official we are going to look at those smoke walls, and we just prepared two mollies to stop the smoke wall and those insta-yard smokes; we kept getting gaps in those smokes, and it makes it hard for them to play a good T half. I think that was the main reason, we always had info about where they were kind of, that was the main reason we could put up such a good CT half. Obviously everyone was also hitting shots, every site and entrance to sites were closed off.

I'd like to ask you a bit about the changes you made coming into 2022, swapping out doto for Maden; how did that change come about?

I suggested Maden when we needed a stand-in for myself when I had corona, then after that it was the player break and it was decided that we needed a more aggressive T side player. I think doto is an amazing player and I am surprised that he hasn’t been picked up yet, because I think he has a lot of very good attributes, but the problem I think was that we couldn’t really offer him the roles that he is the best at. We needed a t sided player that ran together with me and was more like an entry type of guy.

Obviously it came with some downsides in terms of CT, we had to change some roles a little bit, I moved and dycha moved some positions, but at the end of the day we made it work. I think for Maden, he is in a place in a career where he wants to win so it doesn’t really matter for him that his numbers might go down by 5% at the end of the day if it means we are winning.

With that said, I think Maden will just get better. Obviously he needs some time to adjust to our style on T side, and on CT side he has three or four new positions that he needs to adjust to. I think we are starting to see him get better and better every game, and we will get stronger and stronger with Maden's improvement.

On the surface it seemed strange to make changes considering your high peak in 2021 and the success you experienced; was it the case that the goals were super high and so a change was inevitable, or was there an obvious improvement you could see you needed when reviewing demos?

I think at the end of the day every team wants to go for number one, or as close as they can. I think it was just mostly a role situation where it was obvious we needed it because Spinx can be aggressive, but on his own terms, he doesn’t like to go first so much, and dycha doesn’t care but he isn’t the best within structure, so we needed a guy together with me to play map control, who was ready to play within structure but also has explosiveness and is ready to go for entries. Maden fit that bill perfectly, and that’s why the change was made.

We could maybe have worked it out also with doto switching roles around, but ultimately we had the same lineup for like eight months and we felt it was the small role adjustment we needed to go to the top.

How much in general does Maden contribute to calling? I heard him suggest the plan in the 2nd round of OP where you caught Krimz out with a fake boost audio cue around B, is that a common occurence?

Maden is definitely the most vocal player apart from me in the team, he comes up with a lot of ideas. I think that it’s really good, but at the same time we have to balance it. The good thing is Maden also understands if I say we can’t do something in a particular round. He does make fun of it sometimes, if I block his ideas like three or four times in a row (laughs) but obviously it’s really good to have a guy who keeps the ideas flowing. He is probably the secondary caller I would say, like everyone chips in with ideas, but he is the most vocal one apart from me.

Did you know you were going to get that when you brought him into the team?

I had no clue! I was not playing with him when he was standing in, so I had no clue.

Now for some more general questions! The common perception is that ENCE are an aggressive team; is this an intentional playstyle, or do you play the way you think is best and it just flows from that?

I think we have gotten a lot better, especially during the group stages here, at doing more slow rounds. We have been working on introducing more and more slow rounds so that we kinda have both, but we do also make fun of our style, we like to say “if rushing doesn’t work, just rush faster” (laughs) so we also know that we are aggressive. dycha and Maden’s playstyle is very aggressive, and I like to go for a lot of plays especially on the T side. I think Spinx is probably our most passive player, but even he will go for aggressive plays.

I can vouch for that, having seen plenty of Spinx solo lurk plays in demos!

Talking of Spinx, the stats suggest that he, along with hades, is the star player of the team. You then have dycha a bit behind them, serving as the middle-man, whilst you and Maden lag behind. Is this an intentional structure, or just the way things happen to play out?

I think actually we have a pretty balanced team in terms of everyone can actually take over. It might be that Spinx or Hades has the best numbers right now, but at the end of the day I don’t look so much at HLTV stats because they are also very deceiving if you don’t know what’s going on. I think for a big chunk of 2021 dycha was the best rated, and then Maden when he gets into his roles he will frag more, so I think we have four guys who can top the scoreboard. To me, it’s fine that we don’t have an obvious star player, I think all of them can put up star numbers if they are in form, and I like that.

We also distribute the positions so that everyone kinda has one or two bad positions, I maybe have three, but in general. For example Spinx might be holding hut on Nuke, be he gets to play A on Overpass, so we try to balance it out.

You are an incredibly vocal player, getting involved in a lot of screaming and shouting, which I'm sure many have noticed on stream. Is this something you do to hype your own team, or intimidate your opponents?

I didn’t scream a lot in the past actually, I think in the past I could kinda get nervous so the more I screamed, the more adrenaline I would get in my body (laughs). These days I don’t really get that anymore, it’s gone, and also the team started saying “Marco you need to yell, you need to hype us up” and then I decided okay, I’ll try to do it. It’s mostly the team asking for it, but sometimes you also do it to troll the enemy (smiles).

I know in the past you have been critical of the invite culture in the upper echelons of CS, and have recently made an interesting tweet about your BLAST qualification route. Are there any comments you'd like to make on the record?

I just think that it’s sad if you don’t have the best teams present at a tournament, and if you don’t have an entryway into a tournament, like BLAST. I do not think you have that when you do a group stage where you go into a final, and then you leave one spot for the partner teams AND all the best teams in the world.

If you look at ESL, for example Katowice, Outsiders and Players are not partner teams but they are there, Entropiq, not a partner team but they are there, Flames are not a partner team, but they are there, Heroic are not yet a partner team, but they are there, because they are the best teams. They need to be there. That’s why I think it’s a problem that BLAST don’t allow other teams to enter their tournaments, there needs to be an entryway. Instead of having 12 teams starting out, they could have 16, and the three best rated teams in HLTV or ESL rankings get in, and they could have one qualifier for the rest. Make some kind of entryway so that you get into the same stage as the other teams, and not, as I have said before, have a qualifier for a qualifier for another qualifier.

I understand why you need partner teams, I understand the logic and the economics behind it, but I don’t agree that there shouldn’t be an entryway for the best teams in the world, and for the teams that are potentially good enough to qualify. I’m not talking about it being 50%, but you need to give at least 20% or 25% of spots to the best teams in the world, or the best in a qualifier. At the moment, all BLAST is to me is an exhibition tournament. That’s also why I think their tournaments should suffer in rankings, because they don’t allow certain teams to gain points from their tournaments, which then skews the rankings.

With ENCE on an upward trend for the past couple of years, and considering you are part of the best team you think you have ever played with, what are the goals and where is the ceiling moving forward?

It’s hard. I think it’s fair to say this is probably the best team I have ever played in, with the most talent from the four players, but also not to forget sAw, who to my mind is the best coach in the world, he’s amazing. We have trochu who’s a good analyst, we also have an organisation who backs us, who are very supportive and it is so easy to get in contact with them, you write in WhatsApp and one minute later they answer. It feels good to be in ENCE.

I think there is still a lot of room to grow, if you actually look at the lineup, apart from… I don’t think one of them has played tier-one CS for more than a year. Maybe dycha you could argue, but it’s more tier-two. I don’t think we played tier-one CS for the first six months of 2021, so maybe from like IEM Fall onwards it was the first LANs for dycha, hades, Spinx, Maden had tried a few in FPX but not many because Corona happened. I think there is still a lot of room to grow because nobody has any experience and there is so much to learn for these guys. I hope that me and sAw can help them get there.