Puppey on how he got into coaching in Dota 2: “I gave it a try, I liked it, and that’s how I ended up coaching.”

Vova [No[o]ne-] asked me to try coaching. I wasn’t doing anything else at the time, so I agreed. And after that, when we played DreamLeague, I told Satanic, “If you want me to stay, I’ll be here.” So he said yes. [So it’s basically up to Satanic, then?] Well, Vova and Satanic.

I don’t think I need to push forward, like in Dota 2 or in my career, because I just do the things that I feel are possible. And if I’m not playing for Team Secret, what if I try something and like it? If I like it, then I’ll keep doing it. So, I tried it, I liked it, and that’s how I ended up coaching.

The team is pretty good—yeah, we all know everyone can play well and press the buttons—but when Zhenya, Noticed, joined, our chemistry became the best it’s ever been on this team... And anyway, compared to all those other teams they’ve had, I think what Zhenya brings is that he’s a positive person. Usually, all the players are negative, but when one positive person comes along and helps us create that kind of atmosphere—he’s helped a lot with that. And now we get along really well, and we think about it a lot. Well, it took time for people to understand what I’m saying—these are really good strategies for winning the game. And with all these things, I gave them a lot of information right away. I can’t just do that in a month. So it took time for them to understand what I wanted to do in the game. And when it first started, I was just helping them, and I didn’t know yet what they needed. But then Vova just started asking for more—not just to help, but to take responsibility for the whole thing, to draft players, and even to tell us how to play and point out what was wrong or where we needed to go. Well, in short, all those tough decisions.

Sometimes it happens that you have too much information, so you have to think about everything that’s going on, and they forget something—let’s say, they forget that: “Oh, we’ve gained an advantage here, so what should we do now?” That’s where they slip up, because we have so many ideas about how to play the map. Sometimes they forget that they just need to do the basics. Because they know very well how to do a lot of things. But when you just need to calmly farm an item and go fight—like any, well, ordinary noob would do the exact same thing—that’s when you sometimes have to play like the most ordinary noob.