Denis “Grashog” Hristov took some time to give an exit interview after GamerLegion was eliminated from FISSURE Playground 3 in the group stage following losses to FURIA and TYLOO.
The Bulgarian assistant coach had to play as a stand-in for the team after he was given a last-minute call to bring his mousepad to China as Janusz “Snax” Pogorzelski could not travel with the team.
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Snax to miss start of FISSURE Playground 3
Having been eliminated in last place, GamerLegion are leaving behind some much-needed points in the VRS ranking, where they’re currently in 29th place and outside of Major invite range.
What are your impressions of these two matches?
Well, the first game was definitely a bit more exciting because we thought we could win against a top-five team, and especially after that Cache, everyone thought, ‘Okay, if we can compete against the best, then the second game probably should be a bit easier.’
But if someone is playing in that tournament, obviously they’re a decent enough team to cause a lot of issues to someone with a stand-in, especially because I’m also calling so that it’s a bit easier for the players to focus on their own things, just like it was before with Snax. And obviously, I have new roles.
I haven’t been playing for over eight months, and on some maps I didn’t even get to play one prac with the guys, so I was reading through my notes on what I’m doing while trying to call it. It didn’t turn out that bad, especially on Cache T side; it actually was pretty nice. But obviously everyone knew how it was going to be, so we’re not super disappointed. I’m just a bit more sad about Mirage against FURIA, to be honest.
Must be crazy to all of a sudden play as an IGL against a top five team. Did you ever expect something like this to come?
I know that at every tournament I’m the official stand-in because it’s the easiest, logistically. We don’t need to fly anyone in, and I’m playing the game. I’m not on pro level individually right now because I’ve been coaching for over, well, almost a year with GamerLegion. Eight months or nine months, I think.
So I’m not in shape at all, but I’m still playing the game at 3.5K ELO on FACEIT. And sometimes I can get one or two kills, which are needed to win the round, as you saw against FURIA. But generally it’s tough, especially when I’m standing in and I’m not practicing.
So yeah, I would say that we’re just sad that we couldn’t play a normal tournament from the beginning of the season with FL4MUS, with our new addition, apart from EWC. Because earlier we had some issues when we were starting out in the season. We were still settling in. It was the beginning with Tim [FL4MUS].
Then we had the issues with Tauson, who, by the way, is still dealing with some health issues, but at least he could travel today and play. Last time we had to use Maden as a stand-in. We also forfeited one best-of-three because Snax had a very important doctor’s appointment, which he had to attend.
Now his passport randomly got damaged, which obviously we have no control over. It’s something random that he found out at the airport. It’s very sad that the season begins like that, but those are things we have no control over, so we shouldn’t be too affected by them.
I think everybody is curious about how exactly a passport can get damaged. Can you share anything about that?
I don’t know the details, but from what I know, he has one of those older ones where the most important page is made out of paper. The newer ones are like plastic, I think, and mine is plastic. So it was some very small tear in the passport that happened completely randomly, probably without him even noticing. And someone in the airport noticed that, and they just didn’t let him in.
GamerLegion tried everything to get him here, like everything. Getting a temporary passport, super-fast visas, whatever. It just couldn’t be done. And I found out literally 20 minutes before I had to leave for my flight that, ‘Denis, take your normal mouse pad,’ because I usually take a small one for travel purposes. ‘Take the big one because you might play.’ There’s no way you can prepare for that.
And we were hoping… Because obviously we can win those games if every player is playing to their best abilities and I’m just there to help them. I’m dropping AK every round. I’m playing MP9. I’m pushing for them. I’m doing everything I can to make it easier for them. But sometimes… TYLOO, for example, were shooting really hard on Mirage. We lost every aim fight. It’s just hard this way.
Tell me about your role as the team’s assistant coach.
Yeah, we are usually splitting a lot of the things 50/50 with imd. Obviously, he has the main say in the things. He very often looks at the macro of what’s happening around the team. I quite often focus on the micro details, some small position setups, just the details of what we are doing. And yeah, we all speak Polish, me, Snax, and Adrian [imd], even though I’m Bulgarian, so it’s easy to work together and we just share our responsibilities, especially at the beginning of 2026.
Throughout the first half of the year, we’ve shown that it works pretty well. We’re happy with how we work together. But yeah, let’s hope that we can come back in the season because it’s unfortunately not looking good right now.
What kind of plan and what kind of strategy do you have to be there for the Major? What do you think your team is going to be doing?
Yeah, we often have those talks with management. What should we play? How should we approach it? And Adrian, our coach, says, ‘It’s simple. We have to win. We have to win games.’ [Laughs]
We’re planning to just play LAN tournaments now. We have two coming up: Logitech G Play Connect in Warsaw and then a tournament in Belgrade. And apart from that, there are some plans for October because that’s when the deadline is, at the end of October.
