Devilwalk on GODSENT and how to keep a rising team from falling

WIN.gg sat down with GODSENT Counter-Strike: Global Offensive head coach and former professional player Jonatan “Devilwalk” Lundberg this week at the GG.BET ICE Challenge to talk about GODSENT’s recent successes, stumbles, and the tools professional teams use when they get ready to compete.

Devilwalk, a CSGO legend in his own right, brings over ten years of experience on both sides of the keyboard. Under his care, GODSENT won Season 2 of the WePlay! Forge of Masters and placed well in both DreamHack Open Sevilla 2019 and this week’s ICE Challenge.

Devilwalk talks GODSENT, CSGO data, and improving

But as the team grows, the competition grows with it, especially with GODSENT CEO Ludwig Sandgren telling WIN.gg that the team has officially accepted ESL’s invitation to Season 11 of the ESL Pro League. WIN.gg took the opportunity to pick the brain of one of the more experienced coaches in Counter-Strike on how he’s keeping GODSENT moving forward

GODSENT is improving at every tournament. You took home first place at the team’s first tournament, which is a pretty impressive achievement. As other teams start to study your team’s play and tactics, where do you need to improve to start pushing past the top teams?

Devilwalk: I mean, there are always small details that you can change. I think we could be a bit faster at times to adapt. We have all the structure and the key things that we want to do, but sometime’s we’re a bit slow in adapting to opponents. It can break our momentum heavily.

Sometimes we lose five or six rounds in a row when maybe we should have adapted after two and shut down the other team’s momentum. Shutting that down and adapting to our opponent’s changes quicker are the key areas that we can improve on.

That sounds simple, right, but it’s probably more complicated in practice. So how do you implement that? You see teams like Cloud9 create a Data Science position for Soham “Valens” Chowdurry before left for NRG. Many teams are going that route to fill in those small gaps that teams have. Is GODSENT using any tools for review or statistical analysis?

I’ve used others in the past, but right now GODSENT is using a trial period of Skybox, and we’re really interested in working with them. We also have our new sponsor, GRID, helping us with some data. GODSENT is looking around right now for the best tools for all different kinds of data scenarios. 

For a coach, you need a different program [than a player or a fan] that is going to have more functionality than just some statistics on a page.

[A coach] wants to see free-flowing gameplay in a way, I want the whole picture. We haven’t really figured out where we want to end up in the regard, but right now we’re trialing Skybox as our data software for Counter-Strike.

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While GODSENT continues to grow into the difficult tournaments ahead, they’ve already proven to be a threat to top teams. Making underdog betters incredibly happy, GODSENT defeated both ENCE and Virtus.pro 2-0, proving that they need to be taken seriously every opponent.

While they suffered a 2-0 loss against Natus Vincere to end their tournament run, the team performed Valiantly against a Na`Vi side running on all cylinders.  

Fans will see GODSENT next at the 2020 Rio Mino Closed Qualifiers starting on March 7. They’ll attend the event as an invited team stemming from their ESL World Ranking, where they currently sit at number 23.

After the Rio qualifiers, GODSENT will take their place at EPL to see what they can do against some of the world’s best teams starting March 16.