BanKs on FL4MUS: “He’s the kind of player who has struggled in the playoffs throughout his entire career.”

BanKs: Initially, we all had high hopes for FL4MUS’s performance. He’s the kind of player who has consistently struggled in the playoff stages of major tournaments throughout his career. That said, he hasn’t played in many such stages—only twice for BetBoom Team and once for Virtus.pro prior to this. He has consistently shown a dip in form during the final stages of events, and the IEM Cologne Major was no exception. I’m sure he just needs to deal with this problem on his own and overcome it, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the team lost in the quarterfinals specifically because of this. In that match, you could see a drop in performance from every player, along with a few other key issues. If we’re talking about the guys as a team, I wouldn’t call them completely inexperienced; rather, it’s more about the atmosphere of a Major, the arena, and the pressure, which is on a whole different level there. When you let the guys from Aurora Gaming dictate the pace of the game and can’t counter them individually, it becomes a serious problem.

BanKs: Continuing the conversation about BetBoom Team, they’re currently ranked tenth in the VRS standings, and they’re set to receive a ton of invites to top-tier tournaments next season. Tell me this: do you think FL4MUS’s management will keep the starting lineup intact after these results?

Devilwalk: I think so.

BanKs: And I really hope so. If you compare s1ren and FL4MUS... Besides, d1Ledez had a lot of great moments, even though he didn’t play with the team very often before because he had visa issues and couldn’t always travel. In any case, it seems to me that we need to cut either s1ren or d1Ledez, keeping FL4MUS, and then figure out and build a working roster from there.

Devilwalk: Let’s imagine that doesn’t happen, and the final decision is to keep the previous roster. Either way, it’s a risk. You have an idea of what the team is capable of right now based on the results of the last major event, and you can speculate on its prospects for development and improvement as their teamwork matures. At the same time, if we look back a bit, the club originally qualified for the Major with stand-ins. Personally, I can’t think of a single reason to go back to the old roster, with which you competed for quite a long time and still failed to achieve impressive results. In my view, it’s incredibly risky to take the roster with which you reached the very peak in the team’s history and replace certain parts of it simply to preserve the original lineup. I’m confident they need to keep going, because at the last Major, the guys delivered an incredible performance—they didn’t just advance from the group stage to the playoffs, but also faced and defeated some very strong opponents along the way. I think their potential is extremely high, and they definitely need to keep moving forward in this direction.

BanKs: Remember how we were all hyping up luchov before the tournament started? I started talking about him right after we first saw him in action at PGL Astana. And what do we have now? The twelfth-best player in Stage 3, having advanced to the tournament’s playoffs. Above him on the list are players like yuurih, b1t, YEKINDAR, torzsi, kyousuke, dziuggs, and KSCERATO, while ropz is even lower in the rankings. Not a bad group of competitors for a guy in his first Major, right? And he’s proven to everyone that this wasn’t just a fluke peak of form in a single event—he’s shown he’s capable of maintaining that level. Now the main question is how they plan to move forward and build on this success. I talked to the guys, and you know what? Even after they were eliminated, they stayed until the end of the tournament, watched the matches, and appeared a couple of times on streamers’ broadcasts. Then they flew straight to Argentina—max has family there, including a child—and after that, they’re heading to the XSE Pro League 2026 in China. The grind never stops—you know what I mean?