With the CS:GO team on vacation, we had a quick talk with Håkon "hallzerk" Fjærli to know more about how things are going right now if he has been playing in preparation for the upcoming season and how did the team cope with the brief absence of Patrik "f0rest" Lindberg when they had a tournament to play.

Hi hallzerk! How are things going now that you’re not playing any officials for some time?

hallzerk: We are currently in summer break since f0rest was a dad again! We took the break a bit earlier than other teams and I'm currently just with friends and family, having a great time in the summer. Just living life!

Did you take a little break from the game yourself before getting back to work or are you still playing?

hallzerk: At the moment I'm not playing at all, I haven't even touched the game for the last two weeks. I'm just trying to get my mind off the game for a bit and come back even stronger after the break. I want to get new motivation and I'm starting to feel it already after these two weeks, it's starting to tingle a bit on my fingers, I want to start playing again! I'm just waiting for everybody to get back from the break and start playing again.

As you said, f0rest has recently been a dad! That’s amazing, but you also had to deal with his absence. How did you cope with that and practice, since you still had a tournament to play before the break?

hallzerk: In the last tournament we played we knew that we were not getting any practice since f0rest had just got a child, so we just went into it thinking that we were just going to take it for fun, play it for fun, and try to win! We didn't want to take it way too seriously and get mad at each other since we were not playing with a full lineup! It was like playing with some good friends and looking to get some good CS rolling!

So you didn't even have any practice with twist, your stand-in for the tournament?

hallzerk: Oh no, we didn't have any practice with twist. I actually think he has a team as well, so that was not a possibility.

Did you try to get him into f0rest's positions or did you play a bit looser, since it was also a charity tournament?

hallzerk: We played very loose, yeah, if anybody wanted to do something, we were just allowing for it to happen. If anybody wanted to take an AWP, they could take it... it was very loose, and as I said, we were just trying to have fun!

Tell me about the matches in the tournament, especially that close match against FaZe?

hallzerk: The match against FaZe was a really close one, actually. Of course, no one likes to lose, it doesn't matter if you're playing with the full lineup or not. It's nice to know that you can play against good teams even with a stand-in and that you can hold a good level on the entire match! You just learn that everybody has that individual-level required to get there.

Even if the teams were not playing as seriously, do you think the results were a good indicator of what's to come?

hallzerk: Yeah, of course! We did some starts here and there, we have a deep playbook that we can use later during important tournaments and when we have a full lineup.

Of course, it's a charity tournament, which means that teams won’t use all their strategies and they knew about our stand-in. We know they at least tried to go soft but ended up having to step up a bit to win against us, so it's nice feeling that!

What tournaments are you getting ready to play on?

hallzerk: We have accepted a couple of tournaments once we get back from the break, we want to get started right away and get back up on the HLTV ranking since we dropped a bit after the break - we haven't played, so our points are disappearing (laughs).

We just want to start playing officials right away and get back to where we were and even higher as fast as possible. I can't really talk about what tournaments we're going to be playing, but people can expect us to be playing as soon as possible because we have accepted a few!

What can the fans expect from you in the second half of the year?

hallzerk: At least from me as an individual, they can expect a very motivated player that's going to play a lot and hopefully perform better than the last six months. I feel that I underperformed from what I should do as an AWPer and I'm going to do my best to come back stronger than I did last year and show everyone that I'm here to stay!

Do you have any shoutouts?

hallzerk: I just want to thank everybody for the support and all the nice messages! I see them, I just may not have the time to reply to everybody. It's really really appreciated and hopefully, you'll keep supporting us!

Don’t forget to follow hallzerk on social media:

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