Emil 'HeatoN' Christensen talks DreamHack SteelSeries Invitational, fnatic and EMS Katowice

This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

At last night's grand opening of DreamHack's official hub of broadcasting, personalities as well as pros joined in on the celebration in droves. One of them was the legendary Emil 'HeatoN' Christensen, one of Counter Strike's most endearing names within the esport, as well as the head coach of the currently undisputed champions of Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Ninjas in Pyjamas.

First of all, I think the best point to start off on is the mere fact of where we are currently. How do you feel about your team being part of this studio's inagural event?

I just stop and think that Sweden as an esports nation is just two years ahead of where we really should be. This was unimaginable just a year ago, and now we're standing in a fully constructed broadcasting studio which will be used to produce content several days a week. It's a dream come true.

What impression has the presentation of the overall tournament given you?

I think it's really fun, aside from the regular matches there will be competitions for individual players like aim-maps and things like that. It's next-level in terms of how they plan to structure the activities and the competition. I'm really looking forward to seeing it all in action.

The rivalry between you and fnatic seems to be the centerpiece of today's tournament, how do you feel about it personally given your ongoing rivalry with the team?

Rivalry probably isn't the right word, I mean, it flared up quite a bit at DreamHack Bucharest but none of the players are on bad terms at all. But overall we're confident about facing them, the set-up of the tournament will also be interesting as the fans of each respective team will be seated next to the team they cheer for, and we feel that our fans will come en force and support us like they always do, we have the best fans in the world and it'll boost our spirits and make us really perform well.

When mentioning your relationship with fnatic, one almost feels obliged to mention last year's DreamHack Winter competition where you were the clear favorites, but lost in the finals in one of the biggest ever tournaments within the Counter Strike franchise. Where did it all go wrong for NiP, and how did you put the pieces back together?

We took out the victory in advance. After we managed to beat Titan (then Team VeryGames) in that close semi-final set we were already thinking about what we'd do with the prize money as we didn't consider fnatic to be one of the top 5 teams at the time and to be honest I'm still not convinced they are. Since we'd just beaten the one group of guys who had consistently beaten us leading up to DHW it felt like we'd eliminated all the real competition and we'd simply speed past fnatic. When the tide then started turning, we were simply drained since we'd taken ourselves out of the momentum we'd built up.. These are all excuses though, fnatic played the tournament of their lives that day and we couldn't compete. We'll chose to prove our worth against them however by playing as good as we can today.

Titan vs NiP is obviously the rivalry to follow in terms of CS:GO, how do you look back and reflect on the matches both teams have played versus each other?

If I'm gonna be completely honest, if both teams are having a good day you will never be able to pick a solid favorite. Both teams are the undisputedly best teams around when they bring their A-game as we just constantly trade blows with each other. The history between us is also amazing since we managed to beat them all the time before, but they stepped their game up so immensely before DHW. Like I said earlier, beating them in the semis of the tournament felt like winning the grand finals because we were just on such an even level.

To round all this up, all eyes are obviously on EMS Katowice which will feature another massive $250,000 prize pool. You've sounded confident in your team's abilities so far, so I feel that it'd be fitting to ask you about who you fear the most besides Titan.

I think the invitational we'll play today is really great, because it will be a very good motivator to kick us in to gear for Katowice. I love the fact that we're on our home turf for this tournament, but we all know that Katowice is where all the eyes are in terms of prestige, and all the teams are already focusing on it extremely much. Aside from Titan I feel like the biggest threat is actually Virtus.Pro, Filip 'Neo' Kubski and his team have truly practiced like animals in preparation for this event, even more than us and we're still one of the team's that put in the absolutely most effort in to our practice. It's also in Poland, so you can only imagine how wild the home crowd will become when they enter the stage.

Image Source: twitter.com/heaton, flickr.com/dreamhack