Olek "hades" Miskiewicz and 9INE continue in their endeavor to put Polish CS back on the map.
9INE have offered one of 2023's most interesting storylines. Not since Virtus.pro has Poland had a team to rally around such as this. hades and company made waves with a first place finish at the BLAST.tv Paris Major European RMRs, and that — combined with strong performances online — has helped them earn a berth at IEM Cologne.
Against partner teams OG, fnatic, and Liquid, 9INE have emerged with a 2-1 record to put themselves into the group stage; another sign of their progress. We spoke with star AWPer hades about his side's Vertigo, the advantages of having the same language and culture, and what ceiling 9INE might reach.
Qualified for the group stage after now beating Liquid, give me your initial thoughts on that.
It was a pretty crazy game, I felt if we didn't lose too many CT rounds on Ancient it could have been closer but I mean.. we were happy we bounced back on Overpass and happy to go through.
What about KEi, who's been a constant presence online but now coming into his own on LAN, at least in this series. What do you think has helped him?
He rose from game to game, he just needs more LAN games and he will be playing even better probably than he plays online. So yeah, I think it just takes time.
On Vertigo as your home map as well, how useful is it to have a map like that?
We still feel that we have the best Vertigo in the world but it hasn't been consistent lately so we had to fix a lot of stuff, add a lot of stuff. We just need to adapt consistently because a lot of teams watch us, we can tell that they do similar stuff to us so we just need to come up with something new, something different all the time.