Danish cybersportsman Ismail “refrezh” Ali, who joined the MAD Lions in 2020, gave an interview to the HLTV portal, talking about how his career has developed in recent years. He showed himself brightly at the end of 2018, successfully performing at BLAST Pro Series Lisbon as a member of Cloud9. After that, he began playing for OpTic, but less than a year later he found himself on the reserves, without achieving significant success. For some time he remained out of the spotlight of the press and did not compete in major competitions, but in 2020 refrezh managed to return first to local and then to international eSports: by the end of the year he took a place in the MAD Lions, one of the strongest Danish teams, and made a significant contribution to their victory in one of the Flashpoint League tournaments.
Ismail Ali said that after leaving OpTic he doubted whether he should continue his professional career. One of the reasons for the problems then was that his playing style did not fit with the approach that the team coach was suggesting. After the player was sent to the reserve, he continued training on his own and was ready to return to lower level tournaments to find new opportunities to play in the team. As a result, at the beginning of 2020, Copenhagen Flames paid attention to him, and this paved the way for him to perform at major competitions. Subsequently, as part of MAD Lions, refrezh showed good performance and hopes to reach the top 20 in the HLTV rating in 2021.
