Reflecting on my 2019 season

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First of all to whoever is reading this thank you for paying attention to my post and an even bigger thank you if you manage to make it the entire way through. I hope you will enjoy the read. :)

For some time now I have been thinking about writing a TwitLonger, since I think it is important to reflect upon your past experiences, whether they are good or bad in order to grow as a person as well as a competitor.

This TwitLonger will primarily focus on my time with Copenhagen Flames, where we competed in 2 LCD splits, 1 DEL split as well as the Nordic Championship, but before that I think it is needed to write about the ending of 2018 as well as the beginning of the 2019 year. After winning back-to-back LCD splits together with Singularity, I decided that I wanted to look for new opportunities, since the rest of the players (Skude, Kroghsen, Gagai and HungryPanda) and the Coach (Lee Joo Ho) decided to do as well. I made a LFT tweet mid December, but I did not get any offers, which were satisfying for me. My first mistake during this time was that I did not write to any teams but one, which I will get back to later on, if I could get a tryout and back then I thought offers would come to me, which made me waste ALMOST an entire off-season without doing anything and I first realized that you need to ask teams themselves in March (yes I am really dumb). The reasoning behind me not contacting any teams, was because I had been a very lucky person within the Danish Scene, as I always managed to be asked to play for one of the best teams, without doing any sorts of tryouts. All of this was thanks to a great guy, who always helped me with these kind of things without me even thinking about it. For that I want to personally thank him, since he saw potential within me, which I myself did not, since I am a person with really low self esteem. So thank you a lot Frederik Holst! (Holst9N).

As I mentioned earlier there was one team I asked for a tryout. The reason for me to contact them was honestly not because I wanted to play for them, but rather to test my own abilities against other danish top laners, since a lot of people said I did not deserve to be on the Singularity line-up that won back-to-back LCD splits, which affected me a lot, because 1. I was super bad at dealing with what other people thought about me both in game and IRL and 2. deep down I kind of felt like I was not on the same level as the other players on the Singularity team. And most of the time I was basically just put on Sion duty or something safe, which was quite different from my normal playstyle in both soloQ and previous LCD splits, where I was 'known' as a bruiser only player, who would win lane pretty much whenever without needing jungle assistance regardless of the match up. So basically I wanted to prove to myself that I was not JUST a hindrance for the Singularity team.
A player I really looked forward to facing in the tryouts (I knew beforehand that he would participate, which was pretty much the reason for me to join the tryout as well) was the talented top laner known as Szygenda, who most of 2018 was a nobody, (at least to me, since I had never seen or heard of him) but he managed to hit challenger as well as reaching rank 27 as a Top Laner, who had basically zero team experience or whatsoever. The team I asked for a tryout was, probably to no one's surprise, Copenhagen Flames and during late December, when the tryouts were held, I managed to play against Szygenda, but I could not find any openings to beat him or pressure him at all and when teamfights begun this guy made one great flank after another, while I was sitting there being kinda useless and not able to do the same.
The tryouts did not go that well in my own opinion at least, and it hurt my confidence even more. Thoughts started crawling into my head of me being a useless player even though I have been playing this game for an insane amount of time (I started back before Ranked was released, I have had breaks though, but I have been using a bunch of time on this game without essentially achieving anything).
After the tryouts I managed to get on what should have been the first iteration of the 2019 Copenhagen Flames line up, but due to me underperforming in most scrims Copenhagen Flames decided that they wanted to try playing with another top laner to see how it went. The worst part about this was that on the day that the manager told me the news, I had earlier on been praised for the scrim that day, because I had finally done well, which meant being called later in the evening and being told that they wanted to try and see how it went with another top laner hit me extra hard and I felt betrayed. I knew that keeping my spot would be close to impossible, since this guy was better mechanically than me and in general just a way better player than me at that time. So I decided, this would probably have happened regardless, to leave Copenhagen Flames.

The time between me leaving Copenhagen and waiting for new opportunities felt extremely long and since early season 9 was a sh*tshow in soloQ it made me feel bad, because I felt like I was wasting my time doing literally nothing with my life.

I think it was at the beginning of April, when the manager of Copenhagen Flames' League team approached me giving me an offer to rejoin the team. I will be honest and say that right after I left/got replaced I felt hate towards Copenhagen Flames because of my past experience and the feeling of betrayal, but it slowly faded away with time. As someone once said "You forgive and you forget". Today I understand that all Copenhagen Flames wanted was to be the best possible team as well as being able to compete at the international level. (I did realize this shortly after I left)

I decided to accept the offer from Flames and joined the second iteration of Copenhagen Flames' 2019 roster, which consisted of me, Yung Coke, Eden Fox, Guubi and Kalhira as well as our manager, coach, analyst and biggest supporter Guldborg.
When I joined the team I felt special, since once again I had been approached and not the other way around. Scrimming went a whole lot better for me this time around, and I felt like I had influence on fixing core issues from the previous iteration of Copenhagen Flames. The team went from a top side focused team to a bottom side focused team, where Guubi and Kalhira could show what they were made of instead of being put on Ezreal and Tahm Kench duty every single game.

The first LCD split with Copenhagen Flames was not that memorable to me if I have to be honest. I felt like it went by really fast and I can barely remember any specifics of the matches. Most matches during the regular season were quite easy to say the least. The only two series, which were challenging were against Wicked Gaming, where we lost 0-2, because we could not close out games even with huge early game leads, this series gave us (the players) a lot of internal issues, but it also helped us a ton for improving. The other match, which was quite troublesome was against Atlando eSports, since they played up to par with us. Personally I think this was because of our internal issues from the impact that the Wicked Gaming game had on us. We managed to beat Atlando eSports 2-1, but it could easily have been a 2-0 for them. The rest of the regular season in LCD was quite easy, and I can barely remember a single moment from any of the matches.

Before heading into LCD playoffs as well as to why the Wicked Gaming match gave us internal issues as well as helping us improve, I want to write about the other competition, which we competed in simultaneously with LCD, which was DEL. Honestly this tournament was a complete joke. With a Nordic spot on the line and 12 teams competing for it, I thought it would be interesting and fun to see how certain teams stacked up against each other (since it was not the same teams as in LCD), but besides us, Fortress Esport and Ventus there were none of the teams that were remotely interesting to play against and worst of all 6 of the matches, which we played were won by default, because teams could not play or were not active. I think there were like 2-3 teams that did not play a single match, which I think is really disturbing, when it could have been given to other teams that wanted to qualify for Nordics. So all in all we played 5 matches in a tournament with 12 teams...
Once again there were two teams, which I really looked forward to playing against, which were Fortress and Ventus. My personal believe is that these teams were a lot stronger than the strongest opponents in LCD, which were Wicked Gaming and Atlando.

I really really really want to write about the Ventus match right now, but before doing so I think it is the perfect time to explain as to why the Wicked Gaming series helped us improve a ton, since the match against Ventus was shortly after what made us improve a ton.

As I have mentioned a few times by now, we had a lot of internal issues and it started impacting us both in and out of the game. Ingame: Scrims were not going well and the series vs Atlando as i mentioned earlier was really tough due to our issues. Outside of the game we were starting to have wrong thoughts each other and luckily for us we had an amazing manager in Guldborg as well as our performance coach Sandra that had spotted that something was not quite alright within the team. At first each of us had individual talks with the Guldborg and Sandra where they asked our certain questions, which we answered and after that all of us Guldborg, Sandra, Yung, Eden, Guubi, Kalhira and I had a team talk together, where we probably for the first time ever (this was about 6-7 weeks after I had joined the team) OPENED UP towards each other and LEARNED each others ambitions, expectations and so much more. For the first time we learned more than just the surface about each other. This increased the morale on the team and we did improve a ton because of it, since people started acting more like a unit rather than 5 different pieces that were put together, but did not fit. The reason for me to mention this specific scenario is because 1. this showed to me that working together on a team is much more than just BEING ABLE TO PLAY TOGETHER. 2. It made me realize that is it necessary to be honest and straight with each other if you really want to improve as a team, even when personalities on the team do not match super well. 3. Every time we started having slumps or internal issues that impacted us we had talks like this one and almost each time they were like miracles that gave us the boost we needed.

A few days after this team talk we played against Ventus in DEL.

This match is probably one of the two most memorable matches I played, while playing for Copenhagen Flames. The series against Ventus is probably my favourite one of all time during my Flames era, because it showed to me how much the teamtalk did for us, and it felt like we all had the same goal in mind. Even though we probably were worse individual players across pretty much every role, we were a stronger TEAM than Ventus, which also showed throughout the series. We lost game one in the series, because of some missplays as well as me not respecting Markoon (Ventus jungler) ganking top lane a lot, but even though we lost the first game we bounced right back in game 2 and after a long fought game we took it home. My performance in game 2 was mediocre at best, so I started once again to doubt myself a bit as a player, since Zvene (Ventus top) had my number 2 games in a row. Game 3 was probably my best competitive game in 2019 and what made me even more happy was the fact that even though I had been underperforming in game 1 and 2, my team TRUSTED me when I told them that I could beat him with the right champion. And the TRUST from my team was well worth it. Even though bot lane was falling behind, because Ventus had shifted towards a bottom focused game, my team held on and let me play at my pace that was perfect for the game and in the end I literally went and did, what people would call, a 1v9 performance with Jax, but I still believe to this day I would not have been able to do it without the help of my teammates. We managed to beat all odds and win the series 2-1.
I believe this was the best performance we did as a TEAM together while on Flames and I would even say it was us overperforming and this was our peak as a team.

*Yes I have switched from Copenhagen Flames to Flames since it is a drag to always write Copenhagen, after all it has been about 3 hours since I started writing as well as giving thoughts to this TwitLonger*.

Following the victory against Ventus nothing excited happened for quite some time. We won our games here and there in both LCD and DEL. Play-offs were coming closer in both LCD and DEL.

However before playing the semi-finals in LCD and DEL, we had to play a tiebreaker match to decide 1st and 2nd seed going into the semi-finals for DEL. This game was of utmost importance since the loser most likely would face Ventus and personally I really prefered not to face them again, since we had not been improving a lot since the Ventus series and the morale was not as high as back then. The winner of the tiebreaker would face a team that was levels below the three of us, so basically a free Nordic spot up for grabs.

Our manager, Guldborg, managed to organize a bootcamp at Flames' office in Copenhagen with them paying for everything everything we needed such as transport, place to stay etc. (THANK YOU A LOT COPENHAGEN FLAMES). The boot camp itself was quite nice, even though I personally did not agree with everything we did and I felt like we wasted precious time with things that were not needed to be done. Boy oh boy am I a stupid one or what? At the time of the bootcamp I was a bit annoyed at the, in my opinion useless, stuff we were doing, but I have, fortunately, realized that these 'useless' exercises were meant for teambonding, I do however still believe it was a bit too much from time to time. The bootcamp was also nice since I met new people as well as my employer and what kind of a person he was and it was nice meeting him and the rest of the people at the Flames office!

Well enough about that. Let's talk about the tiebreaker match. Earlier i mentioned how the Ventus series was one of the two most memorable series, well this is the other one.
THE TIEBREAKER MATCH VS FORTRESS ESPORTS.
About 1 week earlier we had lost to Fortress, they were just better on the day.
So we were happy to get the rematch against them in the tiebreaker match that would define who most likely went to Nordics.
Personally another reason for me to look forward to this match was because I was going to play against Linops (who did not play the week earlier, where we lost against Fortress). Personally I think Linops and I are really close in level as players and depending on the day either one of us can win, which had also been shown in prior LCD splits, where one series he would perform better and the next one I would be the better performing. And the last time I faced off against him was in 2018, while I was on Singularity, where he beat the crap out of me, but my teammates back then carried the living sh*t out of me, so I had a score to settle. (The tiebreaker match was around 20th of June so it had been quite some time since I had played against him)
However the tiebreaker match did not really revolve a lot around us, so there is not much more to add between that rivalry. The series against Fortress was a hard fought one and I think the first two games went on to like 40 min each and the third one was shorter but was really close for a long time. The bootcamp really did help out a lot. And my teammates performed nicely and we managed to win a hard fought series 2-1. People were super happy about the win, but on that point some people might call me a pessimist, but when I win I am not the type of person that will jump up and scream as if I had won euro jackpot or something like that. Do not get me wrong, I was happy, but I was focused on our next tasks, which were winning LCD and Nordics (The semi finals in DEL was important but it was whatever since it was a bad team we would face as well as the DEL final did not matter a single thing for Nordics) and since I did not play super well in the tiebreaker match (I got caught at a bad time in game 2 which cost us the game) I was thinking about how to fix my gameplay issues.

Fast disclaimer: I know I am not a good player compared to a lot of players out there, but when I write stuff like "(...) fix my gameplay issues." I just try to be the best possible player and person I can be.

The LCD playoffs were a few days after the tiebreaker match, we were still in Copenhagen at Flames' office.
I really enjoy playing LCD playoffs, since it is a BO5 and every LCD split I have played in I managed to reach finals expect for the current one (real time: 20-09-2019 18:48 CEST)
I do know it is a whatever record, but it is at least something I guess :P

Oh well lets get back to LCD playoffs. In the semi-finals we faced Atlando eSport. You know? Yes that's correct. The guys we struggled against during the regular split. This time around it was different and we managed to clean sweep them 3-0. I am not saying it was easy, but it was A LOT EASIER than during the regular season.

LCD Finals oh boy oh boy oh boy. Flames and finals in League of Legends is really a doomed topic. Most of the people reading this (assuming you managed to get this far THANK YOU) probably know about the Flames final curse, however if you do not know lets just say Flames, since entering the League scene, is the most winning League team in the danish scene, but they have never and legit never won a final even though they have been stacked with talented players like Kektz, Cboi, Raxon etcetera. However this time around I was sure that we would win a final, everything had gone our way this week, we had beaten Fortress and dismantled Atlando the day before. To add cherry on top of this Wicked Gaming, who was the other team in the final, had been looking quite shaky in their recent performances and been dropping games here and there. I was really confident that we would beat them, but how naive is someone allowed to be? Why did I believe I could beat the Flames Final curse?? Prior to this final I really thought I was the missing link that Flames needed to win a final, but rather than that we got beaten 0-3. (worst Flames final showing so far) People close to me (a very few in the league scene) know that I hate losing more than pretty much anything else, so being at the bootcamp after losing (even though it was only a few hours) was super frustrating for me, but I really have to say sorry to the people around me, since they had to experience me, when I was really negative and down. Me being confident that we could win beforehand really did not help on the situation.
If I had to give a reasoning for us to get stomped 0-3 in the finals I personally think some people (not gonna name names) were choking and underperforming a lot. My own performance was alright in game 1 and 2 with a few stupid deaths. Game 3 I could feel the tilt and even though my jungler got me ahead I threw it away by dying solo once, so in the end I would say I choked in game 3 as well.

In the following time we played DEL semis and finals, but they are hardly worth mentioning expect for the fact that semis was really easy and finals was another 0-3 stomp (and it was against Ventus).

After the DEL and LCD we had like 3 weeks before Nordics began.
My personal expectations going into Nordics was:
- Sweden and Norway are the strongest teams.
- The Finnish teams can surprise, but I would not worry about them.
- Since when is Iceland part of Nordics in League of Legends?
- Us barely making playoffs (Top 6)

Somewhere deep inside of me, I had started getting doubts about us reaching EU master, since I felt like we had already peaked as a team and hit a wall, which the 6 of us (Yung, Eden, Guubi, Kalhira, Guldborg and me) could not overcome. Once again do not get me wrong, I had not given up on advancing, I was still trying my hardest, but I want to be as honest as possible with you all as well as myself (for future read-throughs). The reason for me having this feeling deep inside of me is due to certain circumstances, which I can not go too much into details with, but some topics are personality clashes, people not matching in the team, lack of identity (This one is for me myself) etc.

Nordics for me was kind of weird. It was weird because I felt like I just was there and that I did not really accomplish anything in any games. Remember we were a bot centric team, but that does not mean that I should be invisible in almost all of our games. During all of Nordics I just felt like a punching bag for other teams, since I just let people hit me, while I never did anything back besides farming creeps, keeping my turret alive for as long as possible and trying not to die regardless of me playing 1v1 or 1v2. Meanwhile my team was performing decently and some even beyond my expectations especially Eden Fox whenever he got his hands on Aatrox (This guy's Aatrox was something to be feared every single time) Despite me being a useless puncing bag for the regular Nordic split, we managed to reach play-offs as 4th/5th seed.

However before giving my thoughts on Nordic play-offs I need to bring to attention the main reason on why I have decided to write this TwitLonger.

If I had to give each part a topic I would probably call this following part 'The downfall of me as a person and as a player'

Even though we managed to reach playoffs. There were a bunch of hurdles on the way. It started really well by us going 2-0 in the first week against the Norwegian teams (Celestial Gaming and Nordavind) which to me was a surprise, since I thought they looked stronger than us from what I had seen in Telenorligaen finals. After that it went downhill like badly, the match against Ventus was close but unfortunately we lose 1-2 and 0-2 to The Final Tribe (understandable since these were 2 of the best teams in Nordics), but the week after is when my personal downfall began and it is something I am not happy about. We started struggling, dropping games and losing to teams worse than us. Especially after our loss against MJ I became more and more negative as well as starting to lose confidence in my teammates, even though they had done the heavy lifting throughout the entirety of Nordic. This resulted in me (I was one of the reasons for us struggling and dropping games to teams worse than us beyond MJ) starting to only think about myself and what would benefit ME rather than what would benefit the TEAM. An example to this is me not always willing to play certain champions in certain match ups (I would take the bad match up always prior to this) even though it would have been for the greater good of the team. The reasoning for me to do this was because of the feeling of not believing we could reach EU masters with this team became more and more real to me and since I had a poor showing so far in Nordics.
Another example of this is me changing my play-style from (once again this is for me as a player and not the general since I am not that good of a player as I mentioned earlier) losing gracefully/being a rock for the team to me flipping lanes, which was not needed and would hurt the team in the bigger picture. These were the biggest downfalls as a player. To you it might not seem like a big deal, but to me it was like betraying the second chance Flames had given to me in order to redeem myself.
The downfall as a person is something I honestly would prefer not to bring up, but I know if I do not bring it up, it will be in the back of my mind and I might feel guilty about it sometime in the future either while playing this game, which I love so incredibly much, or when I have found something new. The downfall of me as a person is me losing trust in my teammates. This caused that I would talk poorly (gameplay wise not as human beings) about them behind their back, to people who are closer to me in order to feel better about myself not being able to perform to the level I expect of myself in Nordics, in addition to this I would stop caring about what they had to say (not everything but a lot) about me at certain team talks, I stopped trusting my teammates, I became more and more negative and started tilting in scrims and sometimes I even blamed others for my own mistakes and worst of all I became jealous of one player on my team, because he was doing really well in Nordics and people were praising him for it. These were the worst things I did and I believe that as a person this is not acceptable to do regardless of which scenario you end up in.
The reason for me to do this was probably to safe my own face, but honestly it was the wrong approach to the situation and it really felt like I was not the same person as I used to be and I started hating myself for it. This resulted in me having sleepless nights, not eating, neglecting my daily routines as well as me getting chat restrictions, due to me venting out in soloq, for the first time since I started playing League more than 9 years ago. This feeling of hating myself made me regret signing for this team, it made me regret using so much time on playing league, it made me regret the decisions I had taken in life so far, , since I had a billion of other choices in life, where I could have been more successful or better off than what I was at that point , since a lot of people have said to me I have a bunch of talent to do certain things, and even though I do not have this kind of talent in League I still decided to try becoming good at this game. Is it worth it? Yes, no, maybe... honestly I do not know, but I DO KNOW that if I am going to sit here sulking and regretting all my actions then I am getting nowhere. All this has happened until recently. (stopped being like this around 3 weeks ago) Right now I feel more like my old self again and pretty soon I can be the guy I used to be who was cheerful, kind, helpful and rarely did anyone or anything wrong.
Well that is pretty much it, I do honestly not think it is worth writing stuff like this, since it can have consequences forward, but I believe it is for the better.

Quarter Final vs MJ
Remember I was still in my downfall period during this match (also for the following match). There is honestly not much to stay about this series from my point of view, the series in itself was quite bad, I played poorly in both game and had a hard time concentrating for some reason, not quite sure what happened. My team executed the game plan really well and even though i ran it down game 2, my team managed to get the 2-0.

Semi Finals vs The Final Tribe
I really do not like being remembered about this series. First of all being 1 series away from qualifying for finals as well as a EU masters spot sucks, but the way we lost makes it worse.
Game 1 was over before it even started. We planned to play for 2 item power spike on Guubis Kog'maw, but everyone fell behind me included and I remember the score being 21 - 4 or something like that really early into the game and we never managed to do something in this game. So it kinda sucked that we had 'wasted' a game. I really do not think a semi-finals should only be BO3, especially when a EU masters spot is on the line. You might be thinking, "but you lost 2-0 you would probably have lost 3-0 anyway", and even though I think playing a BO5 would be to our disadvantage, I think the 2-0 could easily have been a 1-1 and game 3 would have given us a momentum swing and then everything could happen from that point and onwards (Just look at Dusty vs Ventus). Game 2 was a really sad loss, we played well, and I finally felt like we were in the semi finals and everything seemed to be a Flames victory, but sadly we got caught and still decided to pla the fight out even though we were lacking key ultimates on 2 crucial members, to make matters worse it was such a random moment and the ultimates were less than 5 seconds away from going off cooldown and then suddenly it was over.
I felt so empty.
Nordics was over for us and I felt like I never really participated in the tournament.

Even though our Nordics run was over, there was still the 2nd LCD split, but to no surprise (to me at least) we were pretty much all lacking motivation to play the split out, and even though I beforehand did not care whether or not we would do well in this specific LCD split, I knew the moment that we lost our second match (third match overall that split) that I actually did not want to lose any more matches in LCD, but a team consists of 5 members and sadly we just did not find our A-game in time. And that concluded my 'dominance' in the LCD where I, for the first time, did not reach the final. It is not the ending I wanted, but there is nothing I can change at this point.

That pretty much concludes my 5 months run with Copenhagen Flames as well as Yung Coke, Eden Fox, Guubi, Kalhira and Guldborg.

This time on Copenhagen Flames was not that successful and it is not a part I have been proud of due to the way i handled things, but it surely was a learning experience and that is something, which I am really grateful for, since it taught me a lot about myself and what I need to improve on both as a player and as a person as well as what traits I already possess.

With that being said my time with Copenhagen Flames has come to an end and I will be making a LFT tweet within a few days.
I want to thank everyone, who has been supportive of me as well as a thanks to my teammates:
Yung Coke
Eden Fox
Guubi
Kalhira
Guldborg

Writing this entire post took me about 7½ hours, and even though I did not believe it would take this long to write my thoughts and reflections about this chapter of my life, it still is/was worth it.

Once again if you managed to get this far into this TwitLonger thank you a lot for reading this!
I hope you either learned something, had some reflections yourself or that reading this will impact you positively.

Best of luck moving forward.

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