NEO: "With each win I think it's just gonna get harder and harder [to keep the streak]"

FaZe have kept their match-winning streak alive with a hard-fought victory over Cloud9, now sitting at 17 in a row.

It looked as if FaZe's streak was all but set to end when they were staring down the barrel up against several match points in their affair against Cloud9 at the BLAST Premier Fall Final, but the world's best team kept it alive after a nail-biting finish to the Anubis decider, powered by some quintessential individual moments.

Filip "⁠NEO⁠" Kubski and company are now sitting at 17 matches won in a row — matching Astralis' third-longest streak in CS:GO history —, and we had the chance to speak to the Polish coach about the ever-growing number and what led to that success.

The veteran also spoke about the surprising decision to remove Inferno going into the series instead of Overpass, which they went on to lose to Cloud9 for the second time in just a matter of a few weeks.

If the embed above doesn't show up, you can listen to the audio recording of the interview here.

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Tell me about how this map was from your side, watching the guys pull it off. It seemed like they were just about to lose so many times, and they somehow turned it around.

It was a really intense game, a very close one, and it felt like just like you said, that we were about to lose many times, and then we had some crazy Deagle shots. But that's I guess just the FaZe style we've shown recently, we're very resilient and we never wanna lose. The guys stepped up in the end, and we came back and got it to overtime.

It was a very intense game, many close rounds. From my perspective it was really hard to help them out. Cloud9 did really good counters and good reads, it was very chaotic at some point. Maybe we needed to loosen up a little bit and try some more crazy stuff. Overall, it was an amazing game to be a part of.

Tell me about the decision to let go of Inferno instead of Overpass at the beginning. You have been tending the other way usually, when someone is good on Overpass you tend to take that away and go to Vertigo if need be, so why this change of plan, especially because you lost to Cloud9 on the same map the last time around?

The last game we played against them, we had a really good T side, but we played very bad on CT side. We knew we can do so much better, and they are a team without a dedicated AWPer, that's a big loss on Overpass. Actually, Overpass was also a map we were considering picking, and I think they got pretty surprised when we banned Inferno, it felt like they wanted to pick that one.

Date	Matches
BLAST Premier Fall Final 2023
23/11/2023	FaZe Finished 2:1 Cloud9	Match

I think we had a good read here. Obviously, there's more work we need to put into Overpass, but feels like we can do so much better on the map. It was all part of the plan, and it's a huge advantage to have the whole seven maps being played and prepared, and we can just shuffle between those against anyone. It feels like an advantage in many situations.

Tell me about the streak, 17 in a row, and that's top three of all time in terms of match-winning streaks. Thoughts on that?

Obviously it's different times, CS2, many teams going through changes. We've been grinding a lot with the same lineup right now and we're in good shape, and it all comes to just that winning streak. I didn't expect that to happen, especially after joining the team when we were struggling at the beginning of my journey with FaZe as a coach.

I guess it was true that everyone was just waiting for CS2 to come out, and we just unleashed at the time. We've been waiting for that. As you can see, the guys are feeling the game pretty well and we've put so many hours into the work with CS2. At the beginning you could feel some teams were playing CS:GO in CS2, actually, and we came up with many new things.

With each win I think it's just gonna get harder and harder, just like this one. People are gonna get ready for us and be prepared for the stuff we have. But that's also our strong side, we've got so many experienced players and we can shuffle between all the things we have. There's been plenty of stuff these guys had before and tons of new stuff, so it's really hard for our opponents to predict what we're gonna bring to the table. So far so good, and hopefully we can continue that.