G2 general manager: "We did consider roster changes, but we decided to give the team another chance"

A number of guests stepped in front of the cameras for a live-with-audience HLTV Confirmed episode on the eve of the IEM Cologne playoffs to discuss a wide range of topics, from Guy "⁠NertZ⁠" Iluz's rise to why G2 decided to stick with their current roster.

HLTV Confirmed convened for another live-with-audience episode on the eve of the IEM Cologne playoffs, where just six teams remain in the running to take home the trophy and the lion's share of the $1 million cash prize.

The regular HLTV Confirmed hosting trio of Chad "⁠SPUNJ⁠" Burchill, Zvonimir "⁠Professeur⁠" Burazin, and Milan "⁠Striker⁠" Švejda were joined in front of the cameras and the crowd by NertZ, and G2's Jan "⁠Swani⁠" Müller and Petar "⁠peca⁠" Marković. A number of topics were touched on during the three-hour-long show, ranging from NertZ's rise through Israeli Counter-Strike and his place on ENCE to why G2 refrained from making roster changes over the off-season.

NertZ: "It's amazing; you don't even understand how much I appreciated [winning IEM Dallas]. I worked so hard for it"

NertZ was the first guest to sit in the hot seat, and the Israeli was quick to reveal that he trialed for ENCE when the team pondering their next move following the loss of Lotan "⁠Spinx⁠" Giladi to Vitality over the 2022 summer player break.

"I will tell a secret," NertZ began. "It was 2021, or something like that, and I did a trial with ENCE before valde joined," confirming prior rumors which placed the rifler as one ENCE's targets. "And it's fine, the players decided to go with valde, and I said: 'Maybe I will join in the next player break.' I didn't realize how fast it would be for me to join a team and win a Big Event, to be in the semi-finals in Cologne... it for sure [feels like a dream]."

NertZ then started to explain why his success is often an emotional talking point for him. "When I turned 18, some people in Israel need to be in the army, and you cannot escape it.... you have to [spend] three years [doing military service] and not doing your dream. And for example, when you are the best player in Israel, and you see flameZ, you see Spinx, you see xertioN, you see you have a gap that you need to reach and you need to play, to sacrifice a lot of your time. It was a dream for me to actually [go pro], but when you feel that you actually did it, you won an event. It's amazing; you don't even understand how much I appreciated it. I worked so hard for it."

The topic of conversation then pivoted towards NertZ's path to becoming ENCE's star player, with a particular focus on his time with Endpoint, a team that has become famous for developing up-and-coming players who later go on to join tier-one teams.

"MiGHTYMAX and Surreal, they have a unique personality in that they don't care if they have good numbers; they want to support the younger players. For example, the other player will have the free kill, the good kill, the good role. It's insane how much they are building the team around the stars, this is a huge shoutout to the both of them. When we play against ecos, they will never go for the ecos, they will do everything for the other plays to feel comfortable — you will never see any other players do it."

Striker then quizzed NertZ on whether he actively thought about Endpoint's role as a "talent farm" and if he saw his time within the organization as a stepping-stone in advancing his career.

"I didn't think about it but I saw that flameZ was in Endpoint, but I didn't think like 'Ok, I will join Endpoint to get good roles and then go to a better team.' No, I thought, 'It's a good tier-two team' and I didn't know before, but when you join them you understand how much they sacrifice for their other players. [I thought it] the moment I joined the team.... they are selfless."

peca: "We did consider roster changes, but we decided to give the team another chance"

After NertZ, it was time for the G2 contingent of head coach Swani and the team's general manager peca to take to the stage and face the music. The German coach was candid straight off the bat about where he needs to improve in his role as coach, with the team only making the 28-year-old's positon as coach permanent back in May after a string of tournament victories.

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G2 confirm Swani as permanent coach

"What I have to improve on is definitely being harsher and being more of a bad guy," Swani started with. "I was always the assistant coach, the analyst, and usually those guys are the good guys to the players and the head coach is usually the bad guy. When I slipped into the [coaching] role, I kinda have to learn how to be a bad guy, how to be strong to them, having a strong voice, and how to set boundaries. Especially in practice days, [I need to] say 'Guys, stop,' because sometimes we troll a bit. It's pretty important for me to learn how to be harsh to people."

The panel then transitioned to talking about G2's wunderkind, Ilya "⁠m0NESY⁠" Osipov, who continues to impress individually and recently pulled off an ace that will undoubtedly go down in the history books.

"m0NESY is really good at handling feedback, he doesn't have an ego at all; he takes criticism really well," Swani said, mirroring comments from other G2 members who continuously praise their Russian AWPer. "Whenever you talk with him and whenever you watch something, he's never really giving you shit back so he's pretty mature in this area. But obviously, he's still a kid, you know? He wants to play FACEIT more than he wants to watch a demo."

"The good thing about [m0NESY] is that he really wants to improve," peca chimed in with. "Every day he is asking for feedback, he's speaking with a lot of players, with Swani, and NiKo is his role model so he listens a lot to him and that's the good thing about him. I think he has a really bright future in front of him because of the fact that he constantly wants to do better."

G2 were also one of few teams who decided to make no changes over the off-season, sticking with the lineup that enjoyed a number of successes to kick 2023 off. This came even in spite of a dip in form towards the end of the spring season, however, and the decision to stick with Rasmus "⁠HooXi⁠" Nielsen's leadership was inevitably going to be spoken about by the HLTV Confirmed panel.

"We did consider roster changes," peca admitted, "but at the end of the day, we discussed it with every single individual in the team that we potentially wanted to replace, and we decided as a team and the management group to give them another chance because they deserved it. They have proven to themselves, proven to us, and proven to the world what they are capable of and we needed that click again in order to start doing good again.

"What we did at the beginning of this season, after the holiday break, was we went to Copenhagen, we observed [Fall Groups] as a bootcamp and we just sat down and discussed, 'What are the things we need to improve on? Let's try to not put the big goals on the whiteboard and divide them into small goals and then focus on them.'"

However, this decision to not use the off-season to scour the market now rests solely on peca and the management's shoulders, according to the Serbian. "The pressure right now is on me and on the staff crew. The decision will come from our side at the end of the day, obviously in cooperation with the higher-ups. But they do have a lot of trust, if I am able to say ultimate trust, in us and we have made the decision to rather stick with what we have and create stability in the team rather than try something new every time something doesn't work out. We trust this group of people and they have proven that they are hard workers, they want to win, and they know how to win — we've proven that already."

Panel react to Valve news, predict IEM Cologne playoffs

Valve dropped a bombshell news post an hour before the HLTV Confirmed episode went live, outlining a list of measures that aim to curtail business relationships between tournament organizers and teams starting from 2025.

One of such measures was their mandate which will force tournament organizers, like ESL and BLAST, to utilize Valve's ranking system when dishing out invites to tournaments, or else an open qualifier system must be used.

You can read more here, but it gave the opportunity for some interesting opinions ahead of the HLTV Confirmed episode.

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Valve to end team and tournament organizer partnerships starting in 2025

"Essentially, the Louvre Agreement which we talk about all the time with ESL, and the BLAST partner teams, will not be able to exist as of the year 2025," SPUNJ began. "The reason this is such a big deal, and I understand that a year and a half is a long way away but time goes pretty damn quick nowadays, is because the way that these events are run is going to have to change completely. I guarantee you that in 2025, you will not have to watch a group stage like you do with BLAST where it's only partner teams playing against each other and they have three or four chances to try and qualify.

"That won't exist anymore, which is fantastic," the Australian caster opined. "In recent history, we've all understood that [tournament organizer partnerships] are causing some low-stakes games, which is not entertaining Counter-Strike. The thing we all want to watch is the best teams in the world trying to kill each other, right? That's what we're there for. We just want to see everyone try to beat each other and we hope our best team wins.

"This news is probably some of the biggest Counter-Strike landscape news in a very long time, maybe since the partnerships were announced. This is insane. The landscape of the way Counter-Strike looks for 2025, with either the potential for new tournament organizers or underdog teams, is that [there will be] a lot more qualifiers to get into these events."

"For me, the first thing that I think about is that a lot of teams can't get good players because they don't have partnerships slots and these slots are limited," Professeur added. "No-one wants to play in Apeks because they don't have a BLAST spot, they don't have an ESL spot, they don't have any security. What happens now is a team like Apeks and a lot of different orgs can have a better way into the scene because it's more open to anyone... not right now but in 2025, obviously."

"It's all going to be about meritocracy, right? If you're a good team, you're going to draw in the best players," Striker said. "If you continue to build good teams, you can throw around a name like ENCE or even MOUZ if you want to go down these lower-tier partners, those teams have continuously built competitive teams. So these are now worth even more because they haven't needed to rely on investments to be competitive, unlike all the big dogs who had all the big players."

SPUNJ then elected to turn the clocks back a few years to 2017, when ESL and BLAST partners weren't an option and teams would play events from differing tournament organizers consecutively throughout the year.

"We were on the road for 300+ days a year. We'd go from event to event to event; it was a traveling circus of insanity. If we have so many [tournament organizers] step back into the ring that it opens back up, what you're going to hear from the players is that there are too many events and someone needs to do something about it," the Australian believes.

"For the players right now, if you're a partner team and you have to do BLAST and ESL events, that's a lot, that's their calendar done, they don't have time to do a Hussar Cup or a Thunderpick, you just have to do those two things. They're, as players, going to have it in their contracts that they don't get overworked, that they don't go to every tournament, that they take some time off. It can't go back to how it was, it's not sustainable."

The panel turned their attention to the upcoming IEM Cologne playoffs to wrap up the show, exploring the differing matchups on offer — from the Danish derby between HEROIC and Astralis to the clash of titans between Cloud9 and Vitality.

It was a lengthy 20-minute debate between the four on the stage, with Anastasija "⁠Heccu⁠" Tolmačeva joining the usual trio for the final few segments, and it was difficult to agree on a general consensus, Striker simply believing that any team beyond Astralis has a claim to the trophy.

For the crowd in attendance at the episode, however, the belief was there that ENCE are the ones who have the best chance to clinch victory, with the panel whittling the bracket down to an ENCE vs. G2 showdown in the grand final.

Those interested in watching the full HLTV Confirmed episode can watch the video embedded above or watch it off-site here.