Ekki: “Losses are just a way to figure out where you’re not good enough.”

In Dota 2, it goes something like this. You lose a qualifier—an important one, like for The International. I think in that case, you should always approach it this way: “Okay, we played poorly, and now, instead of getting depressed and not wanting to do anything, it means we need to work even harder next time.”

I think losses in matches that you, as a team, should have won should serve as motivation for the future. If you think about it, losses are just a way to understand where you’re not good enough or what you’re not yet able to do. For example, our loss in the TI qualifiers was most likely due more to psychological factors than to us actually being worse. So it turns out that after every loss, you learn a certain lesson, but whether you take something from it and actually learn that lesson depends entirely on you.

With a new player, it always goes something like this: first of all, you need to play with him a bit because you have to understand his strengths and weaknesses.

After that, you already have your own system, and you want him to strengthen it and create even more opportunities within it—but at the same time, he has to stay within the framework of that system to some extent—he can’t just do everything completely his own way.