FURIA struggled in recent months with kye on the team, although they look to be a threat once again following the acquisition of skullz from Liquid. 

With their win against HEROIC, the Brazilian squad will now play in their first ever IEM Cologne main stage, and KSCERATO was clearly thrilled with the result after the match.

A good win for you there against HEROIC, how are you feeling straight afterwards?

I feel amazing, five times I've played at Cologne and this is the first time I've advanced to the main event. It's an awesome result, an awesome feeling.

I'm happy because of my team, these rounds we won were because we played as a team, not just as friends.

It got close towards the end of Nuke, were you starting to get nervous?

Yeah, it was nervous when we lost the B rush on the round before we won, it was tough. But we came back because we knew they'd want to do something fast and we countered that.

You recently added skullz, what has he brought to the team?

I think the experience he has is good, we don't have to tell him what to do. There's simple things, mistakes that everyone makes, he thinks fast about them and solves the problem quickly.

He plays really well in a lot of position, soloing on bombsites or next to me. He's a great player.

FalleN has been IGLing for a while now, how are you finding his style compared to arT's?

I think FalleN talks fast as fuck [laughs], he's been an IGL for like, twenty years, he knows what to do and what time to do it and tells us exactly. Smokes fading, the reads, he always tells us. Having this is amazing, it helps me a lot especially.

It's a very different style to arT though, was it hard to make the adaptation?

No, I don't think it's that different. The difference is CS2, the whole game changed when we switched. We tried to do some things aggressively, and that's normal, arT was doing that and was doing passive stuff as well, but the change is more to do with the mind games.

FURIA have been inconsistent for a while, do you feel like you're reaching consistency again?

Yeah, right now, we are the best FURIA team there has ever been. Everyone plays great, chelo is doing his entry fragging really well, yuurih is trading really well, me and skullz are lurking really well, we're all doing our jobs well.

If this is the best version of FURIA there has ever been, how does that change your expectations for events?

I think our expectations still always need to be the next game ahead, not the whole tournament. We have to think about tomorrow's match because we have to be ready for it. These days have been tiring, but we are dreaming to win and we have to get there step by step.

You've played three BO3s now and your next opponents won't have played on yet, is that an advantage?

Definitely, we are already warm and we're already thinking about mistakes we have made and we are fixing them. We've already been shooting, and that helps us for tomorrow.

If you win that game tomorrow, given the team's recent form, do you think that should be considered an upset?

I think at this level of tournament, there are no underdogs. Everyone can win, and we see a lot of teams winning at the moment, there is no clear favourite at this event.