Last Sunday saw the conclusion of the $10k Fragadelphia Las Vegas tournament. You may have heard of it because of NIP’s surprise attendance. Surely, they came because they love local NA CS, and not because they’ve struggled to qualify for anything else.

The NA vs. EU competition was set to be fierce, until M80 and Complexity both dropped out, leaving just NRG to stop the Ninjas.

A hard-fought semi-finals battle between the two teams ensued, but in the end, NIP took down nitr0 and co 2-1, with the final map going double OT on Train. They would go on to 3-0 Sharks, who forfeited their opening match for “personal reasons” or allegedly to avoid NIP until the finals.

We sat down with sjuush after their win, where he confirmed NIP’s main priority: “Our plan was to get some Valve points, and we did that.”

VRS points have been a priority for this NIP roster since they were formed without an existing core of three players, forcing them to start from nothing. Now at #40 in the world, the international squad is hoping to keep climbing with this win and their recent qualification to PGL Astana.

“We lost our previous LANs because we didn't give everything against worse opponents” sjuush explained. “In this event we just focused more on ourselves and just played properly the entire time.”

We’re not 100% sold on NIP giving ESEA Main team Ratajkowski FC the same respect that they’ll give their opponents at PGL Astana, but go off, king.

Either way, NRG HexT sees VRS-qualified events like this as a win for NA Counter-Strike. “It gives people who wouldn’t have opportunities to play against [tier 1] opportunities to see how different it is,” HexT explained.

NRG has their sights set on the upcoming NA LANs they’ve qualified for, the BLAST.TV Austin Major and IEM Dallas. “That was my first time in front of an NA crowd, that was super fun [...] so it gets me really excited for Dallas and the Major,” HexT said.

Unfortunately, no matter how loud the crowd chanted “send them home,” the Europeans still took home first place in Las Vegas. But look, the Ninjas can’t lose ALL the time.