Innocent: "We have to use this chance because if we don't, then we'll just be another Polish team"

With the RMR around the corner, Rebels are looking to peak at the right time with hopes of replicating 9INE's run to Paris.

Disclaimer: This interview was conducted before Rebels began their elimination match against 9z at Elisa Masters.

Rebels failed to make an impression at Elisa Masters Espoo with losses to HEROIC and 9z, but Paweł "⁠innocent⁠" Mocek still hopes his team will kick into shape ahead of the all-important Major RMR in a month after struggling with their most challenging practice month since the veteran skipper joined the squad in March.

In a lengthy interview covering several topics, innocent shared his views on matters ranging from teaming up with Grzegorz "⁠SZPERO⁠" Dziamałek in Rebels and bringing up a new generation of players to the general health of the Polish scene and what could help kickstart what was once one of the most vibrant communities in the game.

If you do not see the audio widget above, you can listen to the interview in full here.

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Tell me about this first match you played here against HEROIC.

It was either HEROIC or The MongolZ, the top dogs in the tournament, although with HEROIC's run at IEM Rio it's leaning more towards HEROIC, but nonetheless we were happy with this matchup because, to us, we're a team that needs to go and win against big teams to advance further in the rankings — especially now for 2025, when it will change.

We looked at this as an opportunity to beat a really good team on LAN. The A group was probably much easier to advance because it's more even, while here you have HEROIC, who will advance 100%, and probably 9z is the other favorite to go through [Editor's note: this was recorded before they lost to ENCE in the opening round], but we're happy because it's a chance to steal a lot of points from a team like that, they're top 10 or something.

We expected it to be either Nuke or Anubis. We thought it would be Nuke more than Anubis, we thought they would let us play it, but they didn't. We were okay with that, we had a pretty good game plan against them and yeah, I think it was good but we probably made some miscalls. The A rush was a bit ballsy, but considering the fact that the two guys who saved the previous rounds were B players, you could count on the economy for them to play a lower buy, or that degster was stuck in A lot so we expected sjuush to play by himself. If we just won that round, the game was over. We didn't, and the game was lost. It was over anyway, but a different scenario.

You and SZPERO are two of the more known Polish guys outside of the G5/VP bubble; veterans of the scene, now with some younger guys. Tell me a bit about the team and how it comes together, and maybe also about Poland in general in the Counter-Strike world these days.

As you said, it's the good old guys and some young guys on one team. Everyone in Poland is trying to have this unless they're super young and play well all of a sudden, learning by themselves, but that's usually not the case. So yeah, it's like that.

We have some issues. When we're practicing, and we watch the decisions we commit, sometimes it's painful. It's not everyone, but sometimes it happens, and you get rid of those decisions with experience. We try our best to avoid them and to not make critical mistakes more than they should happen. They do happen. I also commit critical mistakes. I did today, it's normal, but sometimes we have them, and they're painful.

Somehow, on LAN, and it's really cool because we have young guys, we play better. I don't know if it's our focus or will to win, and we understand that this is our chance to go up in the rankings and win something, but here we play much better than on the internet. It doesn't matter if it's open qualifiers or something, we don't play well. I don't know if it could also be a difference in how people play online and on LAN.

For example, we had our worst practice month ever now, the results were bad — that's a good word, I would say —, they were sometimes terrible. We just focused on our strats and improvements in the game, it was really tough to play it online. In practice, officials, whatever. It was almost impossible, nothing worked. But now, when we played a good team, it was actually possible to play those rounds and now we can see that something we practiced for like a month is actually working. Just against a different opponent, I guess, maybe that's it.

You and SZPERO have played at this level, and maybe not at a consistent tier-one level, but definitely LANs of this size and bigger on occasion. How is it now, going through what you're explaining, which is doing what you should in practice and it not working there, but then it working here on LAN. How do you mix these two worlds?

My experience is that online, people just don't care. Obviously, not when we face the good, good teams, but it's not very often that you play the really good teams online because they're just getting invites to tournaments and so on. But in my eyes, at least, and I guess SZPERO's, too. I didn't ask this question, but I guess he thinks the same way I do, and it's just that people don't care. They have a CCT event, which is now CCT East, and if they lose that game, in three hours, they have CCT West, and they play another tournament. People just seem to not care what they do.

For me, we've never been the consistent players at good events all the time, right? We probably played many of them, but it wasn't from event to event. But we practiced tier-one teams a lot. I learned how to play against tier-one teams in practice. We played a lot of praccs against good teams, always, so my brain operates at a good level, I would say. I understand the game on a good level, but when you play crazy teams that do careless stuff it's impossible to read. When I see that something is good, you can actually work and it makes sense, like the rotations are good and stuff, to me it's a good strat and that's why we use it on LAN even if the win rate of most of these rounds was pretty bad.

We also didn't show two perfect strats we have. I think we have two insane strats on Anubis, but it wouldn't work against HEROIC from our analysis, so we couldn't pull it off. It didn't make sense. Maybe when I watch the demo I will see there was a gap, actually, but from the analysis it just wasn't there to play. But yeah, it's just, you do what you gotta do, and when there's an important event we just play it.

You don't get to play these events that often, so tell me about the importance of being here at this event for this team.

Yeah, it's really important. I was happy having HEROIC in the group even though we probably shouldn't be, but to me, winning against HEROIC is a big deal when it comes to the ranking. Going to playoffs and getting the stage game and stuff is really important for the guys to get this vibe of the scene and it will benefit them and the team in the future, for me as well.

But I wouldn't say it's a do-or-die event. It's an event we had in the goals this season, we wanted to go to Elisa LAN. When we made our goals in March, we said we wanted to go to the Elisa tournament. We wanted to win one of the qualifiers and it happened. We also qualified for the IESF World Championship 2024...

And it overlaps with the RMR.

And the qualifier for that was during the player break, so shout out to the organizers. I had booked a holiday and had to reschedule because I couldn't cancel it. It was a lot of money, and it was kind of a dream trip. So I had to kind of postpone the break, but you can't do it because there are events all of the time.

It cost me some money to reschedule this, and I had to do it in September, so they had to play one or two games with SZPERO and I came back after 10 days without touching the computer, and we had to play three best-of-threes, but we still pulled through. So we were very happy with that. The first goal is met, and now we obviously want to go to playoffs.

I don't think it's that tough. We're in the position that we could get there. When we came here we said, 'It could be 0-2, that's possible.' You have ENCE that didn't have a really good time this year, but they have players who can play, and if they click, they will also be a really dangerous team. We also have 9z, who is also kind of down, I think, but they can also play CS.

So we said, 'It could be 2-0, it could be 0-2, it could be 1-2 or whatever.' Whatever the score, we just try to gain as much as we can from this, and then the big tournament will come in a month. That's the main goal of the year. But of course, we want to go all the way.

What's the preparation for the RMR? That's the classic; everyone wants to peak at the RMR and the Major. What do you have lined up for that?

We'll polish some maps, some that aren't perfect right now, but the real issue I have with CS is that the moment you fix something, something else is falling apart...

Classic.

Yeah. We made a lot of progress on Anubis, which was a terrible map for us. I had no idea how bad we could be on this map, but lately it's going really well — also in officials —, so we're happy with this. At the same time, we have maps that need some work, so we need to focus on that and to be honest we're fucking up individual duels.

Our individual level was really low, and I don't know what caused that. It wasn't just one person or so, everyone was pretty bad. This is what we really need to work on. I don't know what routine we'll have for the team, Refrag or whatever, but we'll play a lot, and we'll bootcamp on November 4 at the Rebels Center. Then we go straight to China, and hopefully, that's the moment the team peaks. But before that, I would like us to peak in here.

You used to have AGO and x-kom, and even the Kinguin bootcamp place which closed down. What's the health of the CS scene in Poland right now?

I would call it probably non-existent. It's really surprising because when CS was, not even in VP, there was a time after VP when we had x-kom and Illuminar where we won an international LAN, we went to two DreamHacks where we could have gone far but didn't. I don't want to get into it because some interesting things happened during this time. But I don't know, the interest is lost.

People in charge of events are probably bad people in good shoes. I think if you had a different group organizing stuff with all of the resources they had, it would be much better, but now the CS interest is basically dead. Even with the streams. There's like five players in Poland who can sustain some good viewership numbers, but usually people don't care, and before it was completely different.

I don't know if it's the lack of results or the lack of everything. We had LAN tournaments, we had the ESL Polish Championship, which granted a spot at IEM Katowice. Now ESL Poland is closed. We had the Polish Esports League, but they were quite a debt to many, many people. Then, you have the organizations that are also in debt.

So yeah, if I had to play now for a Polish organization, I would probably decide not to play at all because it doesn't make sense. I'm still owed a big chunk of money by Anonymo, so I don't think I'd trust anyone to actually do it. They could give you a good salary and all of the other stuff, but when you have a good salary on paper but not in your bank account, then it's pretty sad. That also influenced people, I think. It influenced me a lot.

I wasn't depressed, that's a strong word, but waking up every day knowing that I was owed 2,000€, then five months later I was owed 20,000€, it's like what's happening. You can't focus. BLEED is in that situation now. So yeah, I think it's pretty bad for everyone. As long as it stays in its current state, I think the Polish scene will be dead anyway.

Well, that's sad.

Yeah, it is. But it's the truth and I hope that maybe when the generation changes and some of the players who know how to do it and what players expect, and they take charge of that, maybe something will change. But I don't know if there will be any interest in the Polish CS scene in Poland from sponsors and stuff.

Do you think Poland is just going to feed into the international scene?

It's been happening for quite some time now. Any good player, especially younger players, when they get the chance, they just go. People like xKacpersky, who is here at this tournament. Six months ago, he was grinding FACEIT Premium and didn't get any offer from Polish teams, and now he's in ENCE. And the guys who were in ENCE, they did something good with 9INE. But that was kind of like one-hit wonders because they also peaked really high but then just fell down step by step and split from ENCE.

This was probably the only moment when there was a team that could mean something because we had some stuff before, like Anonymo with me, Snax, KEi, Kylar, and mynio, which was also okay, but we didn't use our chance. We had the Anonymo with me and Demho in the Major qualifier in 2023 or 2022 when we beat G2 on LAN. There was one round, If we had won it against Spirit, we would have qualified for the Major. So we had our chances; we just didn't use them, and 9INE was actually the team that did it.

Rebels is doing okay, I think, because we have really young players without much experience and they already played at IEM Katowice and then Melbourne, now we're here, then we have the RMR, so something is happening. Now we have to use this chance because if we don't, then we'll just be another Polish team.

Yeah, so maybe you can try and make the 9INE run now.

That would be really nice. You could see that the 9INE people built up a lot in Poland. They weren't that hyped players. I mean, there was a hype, but once they qualified, the whole of Poland was instantly living on CS. Some of these players sustain this hype until now, like hades, for example. Him and Snax are the two people in Poland right now, and maybe ultimate, but he doesn't have that much of a known personality, so people don't talk about him as often as they do about Snax and hades.

Are we not counting siuhy as Polish?

Aaah, sorry!

[laughs]

But what I mean, because siuhy is not streaming, I had my eyes on when people open up the stream. If hades opens up a stream, he has likes 800 viewers instantly. Snax, like 2,000 or so. I saw ultimate streaming lately, and he had like 150, which is pretty low for the average top Polish players right now. Before that, like three years ago, when I was not in MAD Lions anymore, when I opened up my stream, I would have like 1,000 in three minutes, so it was much different then than now. But obviously, siuhy is the GOAT, so eh... Don't forget that!

You do get this team that will pop up, but it seems like there used to be several teams at the same time competing, and players would move from one team to the other.

There's Monte, the Polish one, I think they're top 30 now, which is really good, but when I look at them I sort of see the 9INE players. They have, in my eyes, fantastic players. They could be an insane team, but they also need to become a real team instead of fantastic individuals because their players... it's tough to get a better group of players than what Monte did. Let's see how they'll go with that lineup.

We were kind of better, I would say, most of the time this year, but the last time we played each other, they smashed us. We obviously didn't play well. We were scared. We were somewhat the best Polish team, and perhaps we didn't want to lose it, and they completely rolled us over, but it is what it is. And now they're top 30! So basically, they are the best team in Poland right now, but we have a chance to change that now and in the upcoming month, so hopefully.