Nearly one calendar year after stepping down from G2’s CS:GO roster, Rémy “XTQZZZ” Quoniam is back in a familiar role: Vitality’s head coach.
During the interim, XTQZZZ was tasked with building a roster for TSM. After spending the better part of a year scouting and assembling a roster, XTQZZZ left in late July. XTQZZZ discussed the move with his assistant coach and all of his players, who he says were unanimous in telling him that he would regret it if he didn’t take this new opportunity.
“It was an opportunity to come back and I said ‘I can’t decline the offer,'” XTQZZZ tells Dot Esports.
While he was famously the coach of Vitality from 2018 to 2021, he feels he has unfinished business, as his last tenure ended up with him being replaced by Zonic after the team went international. XTQZZZ was effectively the father of that solid Vitality core that was enhanced after the fact, and “it’s time to finish my work,” he tells Dot Esports.
To say that things have changed since XTQZZZ last coached Vitality is an understatement. Since he left, Vitality became Major champions, the roster only has two players left from his previous tenure, and there’s a new game to consider. While CS2 shares a lot of similarities with CS:GO, the new smoke grenades and deflated round count leave a lot of work to be done on what XTQZZZ describes as a “new project.”
With a mile of work ahead of him, XTQZZZ has two elements he can lean on: French Vitality veterans apEX and ZywOo. ApEX is one of the last of a dying breed in the French scene, and superstar ZywOo needs no introduction: the AWPer is one of the best in the game. ApEX, the passionate IGL, is one of only a handful of players left in the French scene with the ability to lead a team. Many stellar French players have either left for other games or retired, leaving a gap that XTQZZZ hopes is filled by excitement from the BLAST Paris Major and Vitality’s success. When asked what it will take to bring the French scene back, XTQZZZ says, “We need two or three years of guys thinking about the game … you can dream when you watch ZywOo.”
While ZywOo enjoyed a metric ton of success in CS:GO, the way the AWPer will impact the CS2 scene is yet to be discovered. The lower round count and new features of the game have statistically diminished the impact of the AWP through it being less available and therefore, less impactful. It’s one of many tactical questions XTQZZZ will have to navigate with this new team, but there’s one specific area where he has an advantage: the pistol round.
ZywOo is a pistol round demon and inarguably the best player in the world, statistically, in a round that has increased importance in CS2.
“We need to accept that it’s a new game,” XTQZZZ says when asked about new CS2 tactics, adding that while the common refrain is that the pistol round can feel random, they need to figure out how to de-randomize the battles, as opposed to accepting the randomness.
While the economy stays the same, it’s time to figure things out as opposed to opining about how the game isn’t CS:GO. XTQZZZ will have about a month to figure out new strategies before his team takes the server at the BLAST World Finals in December.
