We caught up with a very happy Nicklas "⁠gade⁠" Gade to quiz him about OpTic clinching a spot in the FACEIT Major New Challengers Stage and his performance throughout the tournament.

Despite getting off to a slow start against ENCE, losing Dust2 7-16, OpTic came back with a convincing showing on Mirage and secured their spot in the New Challengers Stage after pulling off a fantastic Terrorist side on the decider, Inferno.

After the match, gade gave us an interview about the end of OpTic's run to the first stage of the FACEIT Major, as well as his impressive individual level throughout the tournament:

Starting off with ENCE - it was such a streaky match, whenever someone got the momentum they ran with it, there was just very little back-and-forth. How was that from your point of view, especially being able to reset from quite a heavy loss on the opening map, Dust2?

I think as a team that's a strong side for us, being good at resetting after a loss, we did the same thing when we threw the Overpass game against NiP yesterday. So I don't think we're mentally weak in that sense, so I'd just say that we knew that the two last maps, Mirage and Inferno, are really good for us. It was just about resetting and saying that it doesn't matter they have Dust2, we knew that was their best map and we just had to win the next two.

On Inferno particularly you pulled off a massive T side, was that again just about resetting after the first half, or what was the key to that?

We tried to control banana, but they countered us one round and we got reset. But k0nfig is just so good at playing banana and me and cajun just tried to get apps control and we caught them off-guard in the last round. I think we just played a super good T side.

How does going to your first Major feel to you personally?

It's super thrilling right now. Everyone says that this is what we play for, us CS:GO players, and it kind of is, but it's just another tournament. Of course it's big, but we just want to win everything, that's my mentality at least. I'm just happy that we managed to qualify for this Major and now we can hopefully have a good vacation after playing the grand final.

In one of the post-match interviews, k0nfig mentioned that he still sees the first stage of the Major as a qualifier, what's your opinion on that? Do you feel like you've made the Major or more of a next step towards the Major?

I don't see it as theMajor, I would say this is a Major qualifier. That's how it was when I started playing, so for me it's not the Major yet, it's still a qualifier, we've got to pull through in that one, as well.

For you, this was kind of a breakout tournament, the first time we see you at the forefront of OpTic, fragging-wise - what was different about this one?

I actually can't tell, I just played the game and something must just have been working out for me, in all the matches. I think we have a really good synergy, the roles are set, I can play support, I can do entries with Kristian, Marco is doing super well, JUGi is doing super well, and René is just the anchor man. It's just perfect right now.

You've got about a month and a half before the Major starts, so what's next, what will you focus on in that time, and how much time will you actually spend preparing for it considering the break is also coming up?

After this, we will be going on maybe a two-week vacation, then we'll come back and we've just got to grind our way up because we have a lot of events coming up at the end of August. I think it's a question of trying to expand our map pool, we just have to be more comfortable on more maps, at least.