karrigan: "If you wanna outsmart a player like NiKo you have to play off the books"

karrigan spoke about winning important duels peeking into NiKo in FaZe's win over G2, ropz's Zeus shenanigans, and the upcoming MOUZ matchup.

FaZe have advanced to the IEM Katowice 2024 semi-finals after securing a 2-0 win over G2 in a highly-anticipated quarter-final matchup in the Spodek Arena.Finn "⁠karrigan⁠" Andersen & co. recovered from a slow start into Inferno to secure the match in relatively comfortable fashion with Ancient a one-way street.

After the match, the in-game leader spoke to HLTV about the victory, winning important duels swinging into Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač on Inferno and Robin "⁠ropz⁠" Kool's usage of the buffed Zeus in the second pistol round of the map. The Dane also previewed the upcoming matchup against MOUZ, which has gone FaZe's way in all five encounters between the two sides in Counter-Strike 2.

Congratulations, karrigan, on making it to the semi-finals to face off against MOUZ. First of all, what are your feelings about the G2 game? I guess it was more one-sided than people expected.

I was a little worried because they got the perfect start on the CT side of Inferno, 4-0, a lot of weapons, so we had to grind out rounds. I think the key moment was frozen's double entry on banana, that kinda made me breathe a little bit, I had to figure out what kind of a gameplan they had, and obviously a clutch there as well.

I kinda felt in control after the first half. You are gonna lose some rounds to G2 here and there, but I think we had a great game plan on CT side to pressure them into awkward situations. And I think on Ancient we were in the driver's seat from the first round and we actually got to play the weapon rounds against them.

You had a little bit of a personal battle against NiKo, I think it was 11 duels and at the end you won a lot of important ones, where you were peeking into him and won the duel. Did you feel that in the game? Did it pump you up?

No, I obviously know NiKo likes to stay a little bit on banana. I know if I win the first wide-strafe duel against him it's gonna be a little bit rough. I made stupid peeks, but if you wanna outsmart a player like NiKo you have to play off the books. There were a few rounds where he could have killed me, but I think it kinda surprised him the way I swinged at him. That was some key moments on Inferno - on Ancient I can't really remember if there was something specific, but I could feel some duels against NiKo on some key rounds on Inferno for sure.

Tell me about ropz and his taser. Was it something he was actually preparing for bringing out in the pistol round there?

When the Zeus got updated like two or three days ago, he said, 'I have a pistol' in the morning before practice and we tried it out. Basically he's just sitting with a taser, he's dropping weapons and grenades to us, I was like, I don't know about this pistol, but then seeing it work in practice was like, 'oh my god.' When he did it the whole crowd went full ham. Obviously he's been cooking a little bit, and it came in very funny moments.

Tell me about facing off against MOUZ. In the past half of a year it's pretty much gone in your favor. What are your expectations this time? They obviously had a very strong group stage.

I think they play super good. They integrated Brollan even faster than I expected. I think we played them in World Finals, but obviously they were not getting ready as fast as we did. I expect a tough match. I always believe it's a very tough match against MOUZ, maybe it's a 2-0 the other way, but it's always a tight game.

And when you won so many times against a team you know at some point you're gonna lose, right? So you have to be focused and strong mentality-wise because they're coming into the game and they really want to beat us, and in their mind maybe they've got nothing to lose because frozen left their team, so there's a battle in the game itself... I'm just looking forward to play because I think it's gonna be a great game.