TaiLung on fcr: “He did a great job. We’re playing the map very well right now and look stronger overall.”

TaiLung: I think the BLAST tournament really helped us—we arrived already prepared. I think that helped us a lot, even though they were strong too. The first game… I don’t know, the whole series was tough, but I think… The rest of it went more smoothly. In the second game, I think we simply outplayed them in the draft, so everything was very easy—we dominated them on the lanes. And in the third game, it was pretty much the same; it was all over by around the 18-minute mark. I think that’s the only reason, because if we’d been on equal footing, our skill levels would probably have been about the same. To put it modestly, that’s pretty much it.

Wisper: I think, as TaiLung said, the draft was the deciding factor for us. Also, I feel like we’ve improved a lot in terms of mechanics because we have two coaches, you know? One is kaffs, and the other is fcr.

Wisper: Well, kaffs handles the drafts and helps out a bit with the gameplay too, but for fcr, gameplay is his main specialty. So I think he’s helped us a lot. You could already see that in our performance at BLAST. I think he’s done an excellent job. Right now, we’re playing the map very well and look stronger overall. After the first series against PlayTime in the open qualifiers, things were pretty much the same. After that, he showed us what we needed to improve and explained what they do, because in many matches we were too afraid to move around the map, and we got pinned down a lot. That’s exactly what he brought to our attention, and I think he really helped us a lot.

TaiLung: To be honest, fcr really surprised me. When you have an analyst who tells you something about the game, as a player, you usually figure out a lot of things on your own. But fcr came in, showed us gameplay clips, and what he said really made sense. To you, as a player, it all seemed logical, and in the end, he turned out to be right. That’s exactly what surprised me, because... I didn’t think he’d get to the heart of the matter so accurately, but he really understands the game very well and has a great grasp of the theory. And that helped me a lot.

Wisper: It’s very hard for me to give credit to someone or acknowledge the work of a coach or gameplay assistant, as was the case, for example, with Mangusu. But I believe that the most important quality for a gameplay coach is the ability to connect with a player. They need to understand when to say something and when not to. They need to know what a person will take in, what they’ll listen to, and what they’re missing. And I think he got that spot on.

He didn’t bug me with constant replays and analysis. Instead, he paid attention to the little things. For example, as an offlaner, details like these are important to me: if opponents have gone back to base, how long it will take them to return, when they’ll go for the rune at the seven-minute mark, and so on. That kind of information was very helpful. Also, since he’s an offlaner himself, he understands what supports need to do to make your laning phase better. So he worked less directly with me and more with the supports. But in the end, that actually helped me, you know? He understood what I needed in the game and simply adjusted the supports to fit that. Thanks to that, I didn’t have to deal with those things myself.