Complexity have become known for inconsistency in their games but they have started out life at IEM Cologne 2024 with two wins and have now advanced to the second stage of the event.

After a tough 2-0 victory over Eternal Fire, we sat down with Hakon "hallzerk" Fjaerlito discuss the mistakes in Complexity’s game, his own individual level, and the next stage of the event.

Interview was taken and written by Sam "AN1MO" McKenzie

A 2-0 win for you there over Eternal Fire, how are you feeling?

I feel good, I think it should have ended sooner than it did but we had some bad rounds where we kept making the same mistakes as we usually do, but other than that, it's a 2-0 win so I can't be mad.

With that said, do you think the overtime is more a result of mistakes you were making rather than Eternal Fire being equally matched on the map?

Yeah, I think we have an advantage as a team, we were the better team. I just think we didn't have the right solutions and weren't able to find the right answers on CT side before the overtimes, if we fix that then it would have been much easier.

Mistakes are something that come up in a lot of Complexity interviews, when you talk about mistakes do you mean the same ones or is it a case of you fix one thing and another mistake creeps in?

It's a bit of both, I think quite often it's the same mistakes where we over-extend in man advantage situations.

I think we lose more 5v3s or 4v3s than any other team here, without looking at it anyway, it just feels that way, we lose too many of those and that comes down to individual mistakes.

That's just something we have to keep working on, if we fix that then we can be a really good team and go far.

Why do you think that is? Why do you think you keep having to work on over-extending?

I don't know, actually. If we knew then it would be much easier to fix. It might be some greediness, it might just be down to people feeling like they have an easier kill than they actually do, mistakes like that.

Let's talk about yourself, it feels like this has been a very strong year individually for you, do you feel like you're hitting a peak level?

I feel like I'm a better player, for sure, but I also feel like I'm far off my prime. I think I've been playing badly after the break, I have some pop off maps and some horrible maps, today I was playing like dog for instance.

I definitely have a lot to work on, I can keep working on getting my floor higher because that's something I struggle with.

In that sense, is the issue general consistency or is it more the disparity between the floor and ceiling?

I think they go hand in hand, I'm quite inconsistent and that can be good because my ceiling is high but the difference is too big and I need to fix that.

How do you raise the floor?

I just need to keep improving my gameplay, keep watching demos, improving my aim, stuff like that. I need to try to look at every game and go back on every game and trying to look at my mistakes to figure out why I put myself in worth situations in these games than in other games.

Do you feel like by doing that you may run the risk of taking the things out of your game that also allows you to have the high ceilings?

It could happen, but I feel like my confidence isn't at an all-time high right now and it's definitely a confidence game, so I think having one of those pop off games could be good to build the confidence. However, with how I'm playing right now, it's not the way to boost confidence. Watching demos will help and feeling confident in the moment.

How are you feeling about the next stage now that you're through?

I think we feel good, we've been struggling to close out games but now two days in a row we have been able to close out close games, whereas at other events we haven't managed that. It feels good for us to be able to do that and it's definitely a confidence booster.