seized: "It's really bad that we are playing a qualifier for the first CS2 Major on bad PCs"

The Russian veteran was critical of the playing conditions at the Romanian tournament.

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Update 20:36 : PGL have reached out to HLTV and shared their computers have AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processors and Nvidia RTX 4080 16GB graphic cards, with 360Hz monitors supplied by Zowie.

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9 Pandas finished 2023 with a title at PARI Please 2023 in Belgrade to put themselves on the world map and received an invitation to the RMR Closed Qualifier due to rising in the Valve ranking.

Denis "⁠seized⁠" Kostin and company traversed the online event with a 3-2 record to qualify for the LAN event in Bucharest, where they met FaZe in the first round. While they were no match for the European combine, they bounced back with a dominant win against SAW to finish day one with a 1-1 record.

After the win, seized talked to HLTV and gave a few quick comments on their games in Romania so far, his joy for LAN tournaments, and joined several players in expressing his dissatisfaction with the playing conditions.

If you do not see the SoundCloud embed above, you can listen to the full interview here.

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Congrats on making it to 1-1 after the first day. How did everything feel for you today?

1-1 is okay for us. It's really important in these kinds of qualifiers to have at least a 1-1 record after the first day. We have one more shot at best-of-ones. We started the same in the closed qualifier, won the first game and lost to NAVI, which gave us a lot of information. I think the game against FaZe is going to give us some information too. Everything is optimal and okay.

Talking about the game against FaZe, you probably didn't expect to win because they are the number-one team in the world. Were you able to take anything positive from the loss?

We came into this game with the mentality that if we lost it is okay, but everyone on the team knew we could beat them because it's best-of-one. We had a pretty good first half, we got six rounds as T side, and sometimes it is hard to get even three or four. We won pistol and rolled some rounds, our plan was good, but on CT we fucked up a little bit and didn't win a single round.

The end result was okay, we went into the 0-1 pool and we just wanted to play the next game, nothing special. You can end this qualifier in two ways, you qualify for the Major or you don't, but you can do that in different ways. You can even go 2-3 and go to the Last Chance Qualifier. So we are taking it game by game, we have our goal, and we're following that.

About the final game against SAW. You guys were super loud and hyped, do you feel like a LAN team?

It feels nice to play on LAN because you have zero ping. Ping makes a massive difference in this game, and it's a completely different story if you have 40 or zero. But we have really bad PCs on this LAN, some players needed to change settings, resolution, and monitors, as I did, and I think I'm not alone. For me, it's really bad that we are playing a qualifier for the first CS2 Major on bad PCs.

I talked to you in Belgrade a few months ago, and you said you want to make the first CS2 Major. What would achieving that goal mean to you?

It means everything to me right now. We don't have a life at all, we are just playing the game and sleeping, sometimes not even getting enough sleep. We did two bootcamps already this year for the Closed Qualifier and now for RMR, so I'm hoping our hard work will pay off in the end.

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