KJ on the qualifiers for The International 2026: “We’d have to make some really big mistakes to lose.”

Yuma: I’m not really friends with them, but I think it’s cool to see their progress, right? It’s a very old team—they’ve been together for a long time—so it’s nice to watch them develop. It’s just a shame they didn’t make it to the EWC. What surprises me even more is that SumaiL suddenly seemed to come out of nowhere and started playing as a carry, and now he’s one step away from qualifying for The International.

Cap: From a carry’s perspective, how would you rate his play since returning to that role?

Yuma: To be honest, I haven’t watched their games very closely; I’ve just observed them from the sidelines sometimes. But we played some scrims against them, and it seemed to me that he played well. He’s played for OG before, if I remember correctly. So, I think he’s playing pretty well. Everything’s been pretty consistent.

Yuma: To be honest, we’ve always had a rivalry with them since the start of the year. At least from my perspective—and even within the team—our take has always been this: we respect them; they’ve improved a lot, and they’re very good. But it’s always been more of a mental rivalry than a question of who’s stronger or weaker. I think that in terms of how we play as a team—when everyone’s performing at their best—we have a very small chance of losing, in my opinion. And in the map we lost to them, that was basically the main issue. The last time we faced them was at PGL Wallachia, and it was a match for, I think, 6th place or something like that in the playoffs. So I had it in my head that if everyone played their part and did their job, we’d pull it off. That was my take on it.

Quinn: Was there a lot of stress leading up to it? Because I’ve played in a bunch of qualifiers for The International, and the stress levels there always vary—some were just hell. I’m curious how it felt for you guys, because it can be really stressful.

Yuma: For me, of course, there was stress. Especially when you’re signed by LGD, a Chinese organization—things get more complicated there, with a lot of layers of pressure. But in the end, personally, I didn’t feel a lot of stress. My mindset was: just play without regrets, and whatever happens—so be it.

Cap: KJ, what about you?

KJ: I agree with Yuma. I don’t think we could have lost to them unless something really bad had happened mentally. The only match where that happened to some extent was the first series against her; things went a little badly there because we didn’t know what to expect. I thought we’d play well and win. One of the main reasons was that her players went straight to Peru. We’ve already talked about this: you go home, then you can’t play properly in Europe, and so on. You could go to their profiles and see that they hadn’t played any ranked games. And that gave us a huge confidence boost because we’d trained a lot. So we would’ve had to make some really big mistakes to lose—and we didn’t get to that point.

Yuma: I don’t think we figured them out in any way. Rather, on the day of the finals, as KJ said, we discussed that the previous day we’d relied too much on instinct and hadn’t always followed our game plan based on their hero picks. And I think it wasn’t so much about playing against them as it was about the heroes they were picking. We just started doing what our drafts were supposed to do. In other words, we played the way we were supposed to play. Yeah, we were just doing what we thought was right. I don’t think it was because we’d figured them out or anything like that—we just understood how they played and executed our plan. <...>

Cap: But then on the third map, you had an aggressive draft: you picked Omniknight, Largo, and Gyrocopter, and just battled with them for 50 straight minutes. How does that even happen? How can your styles and drafts be so different? Did you discuss this after the second game before the third? How did that happen?

KJ: No, I think kaffs usually handles the drafts. And in the second game, if we’d started fighting them, it would’ve been just plain stupid given our draft—we didn’t have any fight-oriented heroes, just summoned units for splitting. And in the third game, I think they had really bad matchups. I don’t know, their drafts in the second and third games were pretty weak. And the third game… After we eased up a bit because we felt things were going our way and they had a worse draft, we could just go all out. That’s why the game felt very easy. It was supposed to be a clean sweep, but we just switched off at the end, and it dragged on much longer than it should have.