The discussion around North American Counter-Strike and its decline has been going on for a long time.
And yes, it can get draining to continue bringing up the same depressing narrative about one of the game’s biggest regions.
Grim gives his take
But that was exactly what we did at the Austin Major, where we caught Michal “Grim” Vince to get his take on what’s wrong in NA.
In our chat with the Complexity rifler, he highlighted the mentality of the individuals in the region.
– Lack of practice culture, I’d say. A lot of it comes down to that, Grim began.
– I feel like there are a lot of players in NA that honestly have some egos. I think if you can just take criticism — even if you don’t agree with it at first — at least try to understand where the other person is coming from. European teams are a lot better with that; they’re a lot more strict.
– So being able to receive criticism and not think you’re the best player to ever play the game is key. There’s always stuff to learn, even for the top 1, 2, or 3 teams and players in the world. There’s always something to learn from every one of these games, Grim says.
He continues:
– So, as long as you keep an open head, keep grinding, watch demos, don’t think everything you’re doing is the best in the world, and take stuff from other people, watch some games, I think that’s the best way to improve.
“We got owned pretty badly”
As we all witnessed in the last couple of weeks, BLAST.tv Austin Major ended up being a complete utter failure for the North American teams.
Liquid, Complexity and company all struggled on home soil, leaving their loyal fans frustrated.
We asked Grim to reflect on the North Americans’ performance in Texas and the reasons behind it.
– Yeah, I’d say we definitely did struggle pretty bad here. Our best-ranked team in the Legends Stage went 0-3, and I think all of us got owned pretty badly. I think it mainly comes down to how much we can practice. Realistically, unless you’re going to a bunch of bootcamps as a North American team – Liquid obviously live in Europe, so it’s a bit easier for them – But for teams like Wildcard, NRG, and M80, they need to get some financials sorted to get trips like that. You need hotels, bootcamp location, food, all that type of stuff — it’s a lot for some of these teams.
– So when we do make the bootcamps, we just need to put in 130% effort and make sure we’re not wasting our time. You don’t get the chance to go to EU that often. More practice is definitely needed. Honestly, even in the PUGs, we’re struggling a little bit in NA. But I hope that with more grinding, and I hope people can watch and learn from these playoff games as well, so we can get better together and hopefully grow as a region.
Full interview
You can watch the entire interview with Grim below.
