Interview: Richard “Xizt” Landström – Professional CS:GO Player

Today's interviewee can be considered a legend in Counter Strike Global Offensive. Swede Richard “Xizt” Landström, 29, had his glory days in the Nip team, where he played from 2012 until 2018. He played just one championship for FaZe where he won the title, IEM Sydney 2018. After this brief passage as a complete, he was a year on the fnatic team, where he was not very successful. But with the presence of former NiP companions, Patrik “f0rest” Lindberg, Christopher “GeT_RiGhT” Alesund and Adam “friberg” Friberg, represent Dignitas in this new journey.

Richard “Xizt” Landström tells us about this experience at Dignitas. (Image: Dignitas)

The player told us a little about how the team performed in the first edition of Flashpoint. In addition, the challenges in relation to COVID-19. How impactful was the replacement of hallzerk by GuardiaN. Check out the interview below.

Now at Dignitas you re-see colleagues who when they played together at NiP were very successful. How is this experience going now?

It's been great, we had a bootcamp from the first day we started. It was fun to meet Håkon “hallzerk” Fjærli and reconnect colleagues again. We haven't played together for a few years, all of us. This is being a lot of fun. They all learned a lot from their previous teams. An example was Adam “friberg” Friberg at Heroic and OpTic, me at FaZe and fnatic. Everyone has new ideas that we didn't have before!

How do you analyze the team's progress from January to today?

I think we've improved a lot since the beginning of the team. We have very strong maps. Now we take the opportunity to play with the newbie Håkon “hallzerk” Fjærli. We are more comfortable and so we can play roles better. Always looking at our strategies and inventing new things.

Is the presence of calls from Adam “friberg” Friberg now in matches new to you?

You can be sure that the idea of ​​calling Adam “friberg” Friberg for the team was very important. I think it is very important to have a secondary call, which has an understanding of the game as it has. Today the best teams in the world have a secondary call. In some cases even more people in this role. This has been very important for us until now.

FLASHPOINT did not end the way you wanted. What do you get out of participating in the league?

We had some problems, Håkon “hallzerk” Fjærli was unable to come with us and we had to call Ladislav “GuardiaN” Kovács. We had to change our language to English, which made team play a little difficult. But we had general problems, first with Hallzerk and then the whole Coronavirus situation. It was bad, but at the same time we were very close with the goal of improving further after Flashpoint. We learned a lot, but the results were obviously bad.

Did you have to change your playing style after replacing Hallzerk with GuardiaN at Flashpoint?

The characteristics of the two AWPers are very different. Hallzerk is more aggressive, while GuardiaN is as old-fashioned as the rest of us. Not having someone with Hallzerk's style of play made it a little more difficult for us. We had to change the way we played a little bit. But I still hit the button that the biggest problem was communication. Everyone struggled with communication in English. Small details sometimes went unnoticed. The mind was working at double speed and it didn't seem to work the way we wanted to.

What went wrong in the decisive match against Gen.G?

Our best map during Flashpoint didn't do very well. Nuke and Vertigo were the best until the trip to Los Angeles. The two maps are similar in the way they communicate. The radar also changes a lot because of the two different levels. Against Gen.G, we played very well in my opinion, we just didn't get the extra rounds. We were unable to close, it was small details that made the difference.

Now focusing on RMR events for Major, what is your opinion for this new qualification method due to COVID-19?

I found this change in the qualification system very good. We were looking forward to Minor, but at the same time it was a good time to change all that. The format was old and was not very good. All teams will change the lineup and get different results. With that, I think it's very good to have the best teams in the Major.

Esports has a privilege to continue working with this pandemic, even with limitations. How does the team deal with this situation?

At the beginning of this we were in the United States, we wanted to go back to Sweden in our homes. Now that I'm here, I feel a strange feeling about not going to LAN tournaments and competing. Everyone needs to have the right mindset to play games online and have the best games. It will be different but at the same time fun, there will be many matches. Many tournaments too, at the same time, the public will love it.