The Ukrainian player joked that he accidentally joined NIP's TeamSpeak channel before the match against his former team.

B8 are having a challenging month as they prepare for the RMR Major qualifiers at Elisa Masters and ESL Katowice.

We sat down with B8 AWPer Daniil "headtr1ck" Valitov for an interview after he and his teammates completed the first day of competition at Elisa Masters Espoo 2024 with a win and a loss in Group A.

The 20-year-old's first LAN match since joining B8 was against his old team, Ninjas in Pajamas, although Fredrik "REZ" Sterner is currently the only former teammate, and team NIP is currently playing. Playing with Jacob "jocab" Nerheden replacing Max "maxster" Jansson.

After a lengthy technical interruption in the match, headtr1ck and his team won in extra time before The MongolZ took the top spot in the group with a two-map series.

"It's not too bad losing to The MongolZ, they're just better than us at this point," headtr1ck shared. "They have proven it in many tournaments. We should consider this a slap to wake up."

How did you feel when you faced your old team? A lot has changed, only REZ remains from the time you played there, but the emotions are definitely still there.

Yes, there are still a lot of people there that I worked with. It felt a bit strange because when I joined TeamSpeak, I accidentally entered NIP's room, and the admin laughed about it.

It was a good match, I don't think they played bad, they played very well. I'm satisfied with the T side (terrorism), we're off to a good start. There were a few important duels, and overall, the team worked well together.

Everyone did their job well, but on the CT (counter-terrorism) side it felt like they always made the right plays and that worked quite well against us.

I'm so happy that we finally won. We coordinated well, everyone had good shots, and that's very important — especially in BO1 matches. It was good to beat them, I felt more confident.

The MongolZ is a tougher opponent. Nuke is a losing map, so how does it feel trying to get back in the game on Inferno?

We started well on Inferno. This is not a map like Nuke where we can get sneaked by the enemy, so we are more confident. We had a close CT side, but when we lost the pistol round on the T side, it was an important round. They start to have a better economy, which is important on Inferno.

On Nuke, we weren't as good as we were against NIP in terms of individual duels. We lost many duels. If at the beginning of the match some rounds had gone to us, we had won some proceedings, the game could have been a little different.

You and The MongolZ both banned Vertigo, and this time you banned it in the first round. Is that out of respect for them?

I'm not sure. I was not present in the veto selection. This is our fixed ban map, we always ban it. We don't want to risk them not taking this tournament as seriously as IEM Rio and maybe playing the map we banned. I think they think they're better than us individually, so maybe we don't want to take that risk.