Twistzz: “Our practice days were still limited”

FaZe have been the best team in the world so far in 2022, winning the biggest events and doing so in style.

A disappointing quarter-final exit at IEM Dallas showed there are still chinks in their armour, and they come into BLAST needing a strong run to dispel any doubts surrounding them and cement their place as world #1.

After putting paiN to bed, Twistzz gave a quick interview to HLTV talking about the importance of a good start here in Lisbon, who the biggest threat to FaZe is, and how he feels about personal accolades.

Congratulations, how are you feeling after what seemed like a very comfortable win?

It’s nice, it’s nice to come here and have a smooth first victory, it sets us off on the right foot. It was a well-rounded team performance.

Is it important to start well after not a bad showing in Dallas, but a disappointing one considering you are the best team in the world right now?

I don’t think the event really matters that much, but it’s important to start off good considering our practice days were still limited due to some illnesses in the team. I think that’s the best relief for us, knowing that our lack of practice isn’t contributing to negative things in-game.

Is that important in general, with how packed the circuit is, being able to get close to your best without a lot of practice?

Yeah of course, that’s why you practice in the first place, to build a strong foundation. Obviously you need to get to a point as a team where your foundation is raising towards your ceiling, so when you’re not practicing there’s still not any error in the gameplay, and I think that’s something that we do very well.

Talking about the game specifically, were there any worries after paiN put together a strong T side on Ancient? Generally you guys build your wins on the map off of big CT halves.

Not really, I think the map is slowly changing in the meta and is becoming more balanced, as is every map. People talk about a CT meta a lot, but the statistics don’t always favour that. Even though the statistics usually show that 60% of the rounds are coming from the CT side, there’s still 40-45% of rounds coming from the T side, I think it’s pretty decent right now.

I think it was fine, obviously it’s our first game here so there’s no reason to even sweat the first map.

Looking forward to the rest of the tournament, who do you see as the biggest threat?

I’d say the teams that have been working hard and have had the time to practice a bit more than us, so maybe G2 or Vitality, the teams that are hungry and trying to look for their first victories on LAN.

In the wake of the Major victory, I saw some talk on Twitter about whether or not you are the best Canadian player ever in Counter-Strike, particularly in terms of achievements – do you think about accolades like this at all?

Not really, because I think small rewards like that or accomplishments are a side-effect of being on a very good team. Just like anything, just like the top 20 medals, it all comes from being on a good team and knowing your spot and your role.

So your hunger is to win tournaments, and the rest will come?

Yeah, pretty much.