MAJ3R's hopes of captaining the Turkish ship to the high seas of tier-one CS

Eternal Fire have shown they have potential and are now staying the course with an eye on breaking into the top 10 for the first time.

Turkish CS reached its apogee in 2018, when Space Soldiers made it to two Majors, finished runners-up at the WESG World Finals, and even won a lesser title at DreamHack Open Austin. But the relationship between the players and the organization was fraught, as while other teams of this caliber were financially reaping the rewards of their success, the Turkish players were just scraping by. Before the year could end the players unilaterally rescinded their contracts.

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Sadly, the team did not go on to enjoy greener pastures. In early 2019 star player Ismailcan "⁠XANTARES⁠" Dörtkardeş was signed by BIG and in-game leader Engin "⁠MAJ3R⁠" Küpeli left the team not long after to go back to his roots in the French scene. Buğra "⁠Calyx⁠" Arkın, too, found a new home playing with Windigo's international roster. On the side, a new star was being born in the form of AWPer Özgür "⁠woxic⁠" Eker, who was starting to make a name for himself on the world stage with HellRaisers and MOUZ.

MAJ3R later reunited with two of his former Space Soldiers teammates, Ahmet "⁠paz⁠" Karahoca and Engin "⁠ngiN⁠" Kor, but this new team — first known as Turkey5 and then playing under the Sangal banner —, could not return Turkish CS to its glory days. By 2021, when VALORANT came out and made a splash in Turkey, they transitioned to the new game, but after playing one qualifier in over half a year and not having much of a circuit while the off-season lingered on, the switch was deemed a failure.

"In the end that was a bad experience because even if VALORANT can be fun to play, the competition in the game is very low; there are not a lot of open qualifiers, closed qualifiers, and tournaments like in CS:GO or CS2," MAJ3R says. "So in six months, or more, we only played one qualifier, which was really bad."

But while MAJ3R and some of his Space Soldiers teammates tried out VALORANT, Turkish CS was making a comeback. XANTARES had just been released from BIG in mid 2021 and woxic was ready to bounce back from the failed Cloud9 'colossus' project around the same time, which set the scene for a new national super team to be born.

The starring duo brought Eternal Fire into the world alongside Calyx, woxic's former HellRaisers teammate Issa "⁠ISSAA⁠" Murad, and Ömer "⁠imoRR⁠" Karataş, who had spent time with MAJ3R in Sangal, but it wasn't long before the team realized the ship needed a captain.

Unhappy with the lack of a competitive circuit in VALORANT, Turkey's most revered in-game leader was primed to make his return. "I find the competition system so weak and I missed CS:GO so much in this time," MAJ3R declared upon his return. "With my full heart I made the decision to come back where I belong, to my first love."

Reality quickly settled in and the initial excitement gave way to disappointment, however. MAJ3R tried to quickly instill his playbook but with only two months to get the team up to snuff, and with role problems in a roster that was already starting to become a revolving door, he found himself back in the cold after failing to make it through the IEM Rio Major's RMR. "With the time I had, only two months, I just brought the most important tactics I needed and I just tried to learn their playbook a little," MAJ3R tells HLTV, "but as a leader, I understood that with the players I had in this team and the tactics in their playbook, something was wrong."

MAJ3R took it in stride. "Being kicked or replaced is part of our job as professional players, so they thought it was a good idea to kick me and I respect that. If I were angry at them sometime later I would not have accepted their offer again. I generally don't hold grudges as a person, so everything was okay. I just said that I was not okay with them kicking me at all. I knew what were the problems, roles problems, and I just wanted more time to fix the role problems. And to bring my own tactics so I could show all of the team's potential.

"It was very difficult to leave CS again," MAJ3R recalls, as at the time had announced that he would once again transition back to VALORANT. "This time I was forced to leave because I had an offer, although it wasn't something I wished for. I had a lot of offers to coach, but I still have the fire inside of me to play competitively."

The now 33-year-old started to play CS when he was 12, and dating back to 2007 his event list runs the gamut: Gamegunes, DreamHacks, IEMs, World Cyber Games, and ESWCs, to mention some of the iconic tournaments he has competed at. "CS was everywhere in my life. It became my second mother, to be honest, so leaving this game was obviously very difficult."

Losing the spot on the team was made harder by the fact that he was starting a family and needed to bolster his finances, something that came to light when German influencer ohnepixel leaked a private conversation on stream. "Unfortunately it came out on social media that I had to sell all of the CS:GO skins that I had for years," MAJ3R says.

"I'm not really ashamed of it, it's life. Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck in my career financially because of a lot of problems and the choices I made. I preferred to stay instead of leaving for money. I never had a big salary, just enough to live, and when I won a big prize pool, at WESG for example, we had to give a huge percentage to our old organization.

"After getting married and having kids, my financial situation was terrible and I had to sell all my skins to provide for my children and my family. The best advice I can give to a man is that we can all have financial problems, but it is important to do our best and never give up. Try to speak about it and don't close yourself off like men generally do. There is no shame in that, the important thing is to make your loved ones proud and happy; money is ephemeral, it comes and goes. So do your best, work hard, and everything will be fine."

When talking about preferring to stay instead of leaving for money, MAJ3R refers to an iconic headline after returning to Eternal Fire. "I always preferred to play in a Turkish team because when I received some international offer, it was always a bad moment," he told HLTV at the time. "I had to stay with my Turkish friends to not let them down. The captain never leaves his boat first, he always leaves it last, so I preferred to stay."

Turkey has a large enough pool that some talent shines through, but not deep enough to keep up with the revolving door Eternal Fire had become as players came and went in varying constellations: Of Eternal Fire's original five, only XANTARES has been on the roster throughout; of the current lineup, three of the players, MAJ3R, Calyx and woxic, have been out and back in at least once.

In a twist of fate, MAJ3R was offered his spot back on the team barely over a month after getting the boot. When announcing his departure to VALORANT, he had said he would one day return to his first love, but nobody expected it would be so quick. "I had started coaching a good tier one team when I got the offer from EF but, like I said, I still had the fire inside of me to play and I knew that with more time I could make EF great," MAJ3R says.

"I had to fix some problems inside of the team, but also when they made their offer to me, the staff changed: Fabre came on as coach and Sunvita as a manager. Both of them were also a big reason why I accepted to return."

Looking back, perhaps Eternal Fire realized they were too quick to pull the trigger when deciding to kick MAJ3R out of the team, although the in-game leader later learned that Fabre wanted the veteran IGL on board and could have played a part in the reunification. "We spoke on TeamSpeak a lot and I really appreciate Sezgin [Fabre], talking with him about CS gives me a lot of motivation and I'm very happy to be working with him."

The back-and-forth between the coach and IGL hasn't stopped, either. "We're working hard on the new meta and bringing new things," the 33-year-old IGL says. "I talk day and night with my brother Fabre on WhatsApp to brainstorm and come up with new strategies. XANTARES also brings a lot, and we're doing two hours of theory every day when I just explain a lot of things. We try to fix our mistakes a lot and I think that this mentality helped a lot for us to become successful."

These team dynamics, not just the players' roles in the server, are also something MAJ3R brings up. "Making mistakes is so fucking normal in CS, it's imporant to fix them really quickly as a team and not have an ego or become defensive," he says. "If a player has too much ego or becomes defensive and doesn't accept criticism it just slows down the team's progress.

"So having this mentality as a team to accept criticism makes us step up faster. Fabre talks to players a lot one on one about their mistakes and I think this is very important. Players really like him and trust him because he was a star in Turkey in 1.6; it's helpful when you have this status as a coach, when players trust you. Being honest with each other makes us progress faster."

The other crucial element of Eternal Fire's success, if not the most, which also helped settle role disputes and has been a catalyst in the team not making roster changes for 10 months, came in the form of Ali "⁠Wicadia⁠" Haydar Yalçın — a youngster who helped the team gel and has so far gotten plenty of praise from his teammates. "It was all about the roles," MAJ3R says of the team's past problems. "You can force a player into a role, but if he doesn't have it in him, it won't work.

"We needed to find the correct five and I think now the roles are more balanced. There are so many details I can enter into, but the big picture is that I think that when we found Wicadia, I knew that he was the missing piece. I needed him for all the roles to fit perfectly. It was after he joined that we started to become successful. It's important to find the correct chemistry as a five in CS.

"Wicadia is very different from other Turkish players. He is very similar to paz in his prime. He's very intelligent, very calm, and very confident. But most importantly, like paz, he's learning so fast and this is the best quality that a player can have. Wicadia is a big reason for our success as a team today because nowadays you need to have five players playing well and the right CS to be successful."

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The release of CS2 came at the right time, too. Eternal Fire appeared on the radar as a team to watch at ESL Pro League Season 18, the final Big Event played on CS:GO, by making it to the quarter-finals with victories over the likes of Cloud9, Liquid and Astralis. The motivation of a strong result along with an eagerness to fight at the top in a new meta is proving to be fertile ground for MAJ3R and his men.

Space Soldiers and Eternal Fire are two different stories, two stories that MAJ3R is proud of being a part of, and now he hopes that he can find the trade winds to take Turkey where it couldn't quite sail in the past. "My goal as a leader for my team is to stay in the ocean where all of the tier one teams are playing," he says.

"Making the Major was very important and we made it, but the most important is to stay here, to play all of the upcoming Majors and stay in the top 20. Entering the top 10 is a goal, we are 11 now, but more than numbers I just want to play all of the top tier LANs possible and face teams like FaZe, G2, Vitality, etc., all of the time."

And so far Eternal Fire are proving that this is not a pipe dream. MAJ3R and his teammates have only lost to top teams this year, and all of them were competitive matches. The Turks, who were second at PARI Please and ESL Challenger Jönköping at the tail end of 2023, have so far lifted maps off of FaZe and Natus Vincere, and took G2 to overtime in a best-of-one. They also beat Falcons twice in one-sided affairs at IEM Katowice and the RMR.

Eternal Fire haven't reached the heights of finishing top 16 at a Major or second at an event of the stature of Space Soldiers' WESG run, but the above accolades have made them 11th in the world, the highest placing any Turkish team has ever had on HLTV's ranking. A good showing at the coming Major in Copenhagen could no doubt push them even further up, which would mean breaking that desired top 10 threshold.

"You have a good feeling when you know you are giving everything you have, no matter what comes in the end, win or lose," MAJ3R concludes. "It's important to give everything and be happy with yourself when you lay in bed at night. My only philosophy in life is to not have regrets. It doesn't matter what you do in your life as a job, just do it 100%."

MAJ3R's story is as rich as they come for a player without a filled-out trophy cabinet. The 33-year-old veteran has been up and down and has fought his way in different scenes — even different games, when necessary — since esports were not yet professional. And even when it may have been more rewarding for him to personally veer off the path, he followed his heart — a heart that made him the captain of the Turkish ship.