SK Gaming CS:GO coach says they're having trouble getting scrims with NA teams, Cloud9 responds
SK Gaming’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team has been having problems finding other teams to scrim with in North America, according to team coach Ricardo “Dead” Sinigaglia.
In an interview with Yahoo Esports, Sinigaglia spoke about the team’s regional practice difficulties.
“For practicing here, it’s still way harder than Europe,” Sinigaglia said. “In Europe you have more teams, teams that are always willing. The difference actually from this season, most of the teams now that we’re facing… they don’t want to practice with us anymore. Like Cloud9, we’re always asking for practice [with] them. I think last season, we practiced like two times against them. This season, one map. But we try.”
According to Sinigaglia, the team is making trips to Europe for the express purpose of practicing CS:GO.
“For us, it’s good to have a really strong region. We don’t have to travel to Europe to bootcamp every time, like we’re going to do right now. We’re going to stop here, go to Germany for ten days, Poland, then come back. We don’t really see the necessity to do that, because the first major we won just practicing against NA teams. There’s a way to achieve really top CS:GO here in NA. But the teams [have] got to help… we’re willing to help them. To teach them how to be better, and they can give us experience as well. But it doesn’t seem like everybody is on the same page right now.”
“It doesn’t really matter if we lose to an NA team or a Europe team. We know our level nowadays. We are like the best team here in NA, and there’s a really huge gap from the other teams. It doesn’t even make sense for a team to deny practicing for us. Because for us it’s the best we can get, but it’s not like they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re better if we can get like a European team for sure.’ But it’s weird because it [should] be different. They’re supposed to be asking to practice a lot with us. Like, teams that really practice against us, you’ve got Immortals, you’ve got Team Liquid, you’ve got OpTic Gaming. And in certain ways, we feel responsible even for their success. We know they’ve been practicing a lot with us and we are getting better together.”
Current Cloud9 trial coach Soham “valens” Chowdhury responded directly to the claims in a separate interview with Yahoo Esports.
“Although I wasn’t with the team last season, I can only comment about the season so far,” valens said. “I think the general rule of thumb is that if you’re going to be playing a team that week in league matches, or they’re in our group for a tournament, we’ll probably try and not to play against them. Because we’re about to play with them in a big match. Besides that, that’s not SK-specific. That’s kind of…something that we would probably do against any team. We’ve already scrimmed with them this season, I think Ricardo mentioned that as well. And we have the most respect for them, and we love playing them.”
“As far as this season goes, we’d love to play them as much as we can. I think our map pools are also more similar this season. They’ve been working on the maps that we also play and vice-versa. And that’s just something that you know is not again SK-specific, they’re just now another team that plays more of the maps we do. So I definitely foresee more scrims and more practice with them this season.”
The two teams faced off in the elimination matches at DreamHack Masters Las Vegas yesterday, with SK Gaming winning 16-6. We’ve got more CS:GO interviews and content coming from the event, so be sure to keep an eye on the hub.
