Following Renegades victory over Gambit that secured them a spot in the playoffs of DreamHack ZOWIE Open Winter 2016, we talked to Aaron "AZR" Ward to find out about the two matches and using the classic coach rules that DreamHack employs.

Renegades have managed to exceed expectations at DreamHack Winter by getting two wins on day one and taking the first seed out of group B.

To see how the team is feeling after the victory, we talked to Aaron "⁠AZR⁠" Ward, who revealed some details about the Cache pick against Gambit and the differences between Chad "⁠SPUNJ⁠" Burchill's and Yaman "⁠yam⁠" Ergenekon's styles of calling.

Let's start with first match here, against Cloud9. You managed to shut down most of their players, how did it go for you, how did it feel? We knew coming into the game that it was probably going to be Dust2. We started off pretty strong, in the first half it was 11-4. From then on we thought we had the game, it was just about closing it out. It gone on and on and on, 16-14, but eventually we closed it out so we are pretty happy about it. As it was something you were struggling with, did closing out that match help you in the match against Gambit? I don't think so, not really, but coming into that game we had a lot more confidence than we usually had in the past. Going on to the match against Gambit, you played Cache, a map both of you don't really play. Were you actually prepared, were you expecting the map? We were not expecting Cache at all, we were honestly expecting Train or Cobble. We don't play the map in a lot of competitions but we still practice the map, so we have all sorts of things for it.



AZR feels that the old coaching rules helped them

You had a lot of time playing with yam now as your in-game leader, how do you feel now, moving from SPUNJ to him? yam's individual statistics have dropped as well, how does the change feel like? They are completely different, SPUNJ and yam. Chad was a strat caller, very controlive. Compared to yam, he will let us do whatever we want pretty much, play with confidence. That's what we sort off started to bring to the team when yam's been in-game leading and it's been working out for us really well. Here at DreamHack they don't use the standard Valve coaching rules, did that help you out a bit, using peekay? It does, because before the rule came in peekay used to talk all the time on the microphone, he'd fix our communication and stuff like that. He would see little things that we couldn't see on everyone's screens. It definitely helped us a lot today. You already have a good result here, how is that gonna help moving into the Major qualifier that is the most stacked ever? How are you feeling about that? I'm not actually sure, but coming into the Major qualifier it's going to be hard with teams like NiP, FaZe, all sorts of teams - but I think we can qualify for the Major I feel like we have what it takes to do it.

Professeur writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter