HooXi: If the player break didn’t come it would have been “GG” for me

The Summer of 2023 will forever go down in the history books of Counter-Strike as one of the craziest times in competitive CS. The countless roster moves left the number of teams that did not change their roster clearly outnumbered. One of them was G2. The IEM Katowice champions chose to stick with their lineup despite a couple of bad results towards the end of the season with BLAST Paris Major and IEM Dallas being the absolute low points of the season.

On the podcast "Talking Counter" G2's in-game leader Rasmus "HooXi" Nielsen spoke about the end of the last season when he began to feel burned out.

- The tournaments (IEM Dallas and BLAST Spring Finals) after (the Paris Major) were a mix of disappointment of all the hard work that didn’t pay off, and also me burning out completely. It was my first season of travelling this much and a lot of shit happened in my personal life. I don’t know how depression feels, but I think that was the start of a depression for me. If the player break didn’t come it was “GG” for me, HooXi explained to Janko "YNk" Paunović and Jason "moses" O'Toole.

The Danish in-game leader was mentioned during the summer as the most likely candidate to be switched out on the team if G2 were to make any roster move. That never happened and perhaps it was because HooXi was honest about his need for a break.

- To be fair. The smartest decision for me would have been to skip the NA events, the G2 IGL told in the podcast, where he also explained the conversation, he had with the G2 management after the season was over, where he stated, that he hoped to get another chance to prove his worth, which immediately paid off with a win at IEM Cologne.

HooXi and G2 went through the group phase of the ESL Pro League winning all three matches. They are qualified directly for the Quarter-Finals of the tournament on Friday.

You can watch the entire episode with Hooxi down below.