Boombl4 on making the VRS top 9: “Everyone is surprised, just like they are by everything that’s been happening lately.”

I’d say I didn’t really prepare for anything at all; it was just a pretty strong and interesting opponent that we wanted to play against to see what we’re capable of, how we’d play, whether there would be any pressure, and whether we could hold our own—both individually and as a team—in this match.

Well, overall, it seems to me that all the teams here are worthy, and it’s clear that if you look at the big picture, some teams are stronger, but overall in this tournament, every team can put up a fight in a given match, so there are no easy opponents.

I’d say that, probably, the only difficult opponents for us right now are from a map pool perspective, because we’re playing with a substitute and there are teams that are more favorable to us and teams that are less favorable. But overall, I think that Team Spirit, Vitality, and NAVI are probably the three most dangerous teams; they’ve been showing good structural play lately, have a ton of experience, and generally won’t be nervous against us, so to speak, regardless of our results and so on.

I saw that news, yeah. I think everyone’s surprised, just like they are by what’s been happening lately—the results we’re putting up and how we’re managing to play despite our tough situation. It’s cool, of course, but the system works in such a way that one bad tournament and you can fall out of the top 9, so I don’t think we should get too excited about it; it’s just cool, and we really need to put in a lot of work to stay in this spot or climb even higher.

You have to expect anything and everything from them. They’re pretty active, they switch positions a lot, they play aggressively, and they show unreal individual play in some matches. So, let’s just say, you have to stay focused every second when playing them. If I’m talking specifically about the match, it was probably the earliest match we’ve played since the first stage— it was early—meaning we had to leave at 9:30 a.m., so we had to wake up at 8:30, get our heads together, drink coffee, take a shower, and even that might not help, even if you plan your schedule. So the first map turned out to be pretty tough for the first side, but we did a great job of winning our rounds on defense and getting a feel for the game—that helped us get into the second map well, and the third one was kind of a “cinema” match. We won a lot of those rounds with two guns when we were ecoing, so overall we put up a fight and came out on top 13-11 on the third map. It was a good start to the tournament and a good reminder that morning matches can be tough.