An interview with Fatih "⁠gob b⁠" Dayik, BIG's in-game leader, closes out our coverage from ESL One Belo Horizonte and starts the segway towards ESL One Cologne.

gob b's BIG were unable to make it out of the group stage in Belo Horizonte, losing twice to Liquid, in the opener and decider, the latter having been played after they knocked Lincoln "⁠fnx⁠" Lau's Não Tem Como out.

gob b will work on trying to find BIG's playstyle before Cologne

Below, gob b talks about his side's run in Brazil, how Owen "⁠smooya⁠" Butterfield is adapting to the German team, and what is to come during the build-up to ESL One Cologne where BIG will be the home crowd favorite, among other topics.

Tell me a bit about ESL One Belo Horizonte, what are the most important things you're taking with you from your time in Brazil?

For us, the most important thing is that we try to make fewer mistakes. That's the most important part. Sometimes the enemy forces you to make mistakes, but we made mistakes like someone not throwing a smoke, or failing a smoke, or not knowing what to do in which strategy, so we'll fix that a little. Maybe have fewer strategies, or perhaps a bit easier ones, so that we don't have too many strategies. That's the most important thing to take away from this event, I think.

Do you think some of these mistakes are happening due to communication now that you have to speak English and have this English-German mix? How is this new way of communicating working out?

It doesn't feel that bad, but after seeing our mistakes, I think we need to make shorter calls. We've already watched every demo, but when we go home after a few days of thinking about it we'll be able to say, "OK, that was our mistake," maybe it's the communication, maybe that we should have talked more before the game... that kind of stuff. When we get back home we'll find out what the real reasons were.

Talking about after the tournament, Cologne is coming up soon, are you going to prepare in any particular way? Maybe a bootcamp?

I think we have nine days of practice and a day off when we get back. I will try to find the problems and try to make new and easier strategies. Then we'll talk about them together, everyone will say what they think, and after we get the feedback we'll come up with a new style. It won't be too complicated, since we just have like nine days, and we're still a young team. I think smooya and tabseN will go home, we will have mostly online practice, I guess.

Now that you have smooya on the team... For a while you were playing with LEGIJA and tabseN was AWPing a bit. How has having a designated AWPer once again changed the dynamic in the team?

I don't think it changed that much, I think tabseN did a great job with the AWP, but smooya as a person has definitely changed the dynamic. He's young, he's really hungry, he's trying really hard... I think that's giving the team a bit more motivation, and seeing him all of the time playing Counter-Strike is making all the players say, like, "wow, I also need to step up and keep playing as much as he does."

smooya is helping the motivation, but also bringing some nervousness into the game because he's a new player. That's also sometimes good, though, because if you have that nervousness you feel like it really matters and that's really good, I think.

Now that LEGIJA can sit back and go back to his previous role without having to worry about playing, watching demos and helping you and kakafu, has anything changed?

It's helping, for sure, but as I said we're just a new team. We haven't found our groove yet. We haven't found how we want to play; fast, slow, etc. We don't have a perfect balance yet. It's not that big of a problem because it's just been like three weeks or a month of practice with smooya. To find a really good system takes time, and it takes failure, like what happened in this tournament, but then we learn from it.

Before you played in Brazil, did you have any particular goals?

For me, it was reaching playoffs, for sure. I didn't know the deciders were going to be played on stage, so that was a cool surprise. Overall, it was really hard to win against Liquid. I think they played much better against us than they did against mousesports. They felt more confident, they hit their shots, etc. They're just a really good team, and losing to just one team... you can't say much about it. We just have to be patient and wait to see what happens in Cologne.

How was it to play against Liquid on stage in front of the crowd?

It was amazing, the crowd was going nuts. It was also really hard because we played the same maps twice. It's hard to do that, because you go in thinking, "OK, we played them here once, so how are they going to adjust? How should we adjust?" There were a couple times we could have won and the game would have changed, but both times NAF won the round. Props to him, if he wouldn't have won those rounds in which we made mistakes, and in which he hit all his shots, the game could have changed and we could have maybe gone on to Dust2. I think both games were really close, not always on the scoreboard, but it felt like we had a competitive game going on. But they're just a good team, as I said, and losing to the one team is just a bit hard sometimes.

How about the expectations going into Cologne? You'll have a bit of time to practice, even if it's just online, but you'll be able to polish and change. The event is home to you, what do you want from it?

Playoffs, man. We need to play in the arena in front of the German crowd. We will try really hard to achieve this goal. In Brazil, we grew as a team, so we will think about our mistakes, how to become better and take the tough game against Liquid as an example. It will be a good thing to remind us, "OK, we're losing like X, so we need to change Y."

Winning against NTC was also rough because even then we made a lot of mistakes, missed a lot of smokes, and so on, but even when we play bad we can at least be competitive against good teams, which is a big motivation for us because we're still a young team and we say, "wow, we really didn't play good CS and we could still compete against these teams." If we manage to not make as many mistakes we can actually reach our goals.

To close it out, tiziaN sent a bit of a defensive tweet after you were eliminated because he was feeling criticized for his performance. Is there anything you have to say in his defence?