Manila Major Part 2

Got back home earlier today after a very well handled event in Manila. It’s so great to see that everything got a lot more serious after the failure at the Shanghai Major so hopefully this will keep up for the future Majors as well. PGL, the Valve staff and everyone else involved did a really good job, props to you guys!

Our schedule is quite packed right now. We are having one day off now after we got back home but after that we are gonna continue to practice for ESL Frankfurt. It’s been a lot of practice and games the past weeks but with TI6 coming up it’s not that hard to be motivated to keep on practicing and playing.

This event was the first one in a long time where we had a coach with us (last one was during TI4 where Winter coached us) and even though we didn’t get so far in the tournament I’m very happy with what Synderen helped us with. He was very on-point with things that we needed to improve on and didn’t hesitate to speak up. We managed to get better with a lot of things during the bootcamp thanks to him but unfortunately it wasn’t enough for us this tournament. Only thing we can do from here is to look forward and do our best at ESL Frankfurt and then hopefully at TI6 as well.

Going back a bit to the games I was very happy with the win over Mineski. Their draft was quite good versus ours and at one point the game even looked a bit grim for us when they pushed our highground early. We came back though by taking good fights and defending our base until we were strong enough to pressure them. Was fun to play Keeper of The Light again, really like that hero!

Next series against Navi was very fun to play even though we lost. I read somewhere that the viewing numbers was insanely high even though the game were played on a weekday and it wasn’t even that far into the bracket. It’s fun to see that the Alliance/Navi hype is still there and I’m very grateful to be able to be a part of it. We could definitely have won game 2 against them. We had all the tools to be able to win it but in my opinion we didn’t play and take fights as we should have. We should have forced the fights a bit more when we were so much stronger than them but I think the problem was that we kept on playing as we have been doing a lot of other similar games (win it slowly) but the difference here was that since they had Huskar we either needed to win the game before he got all his items or we should have built items to counter him straight away. None of us really thought about this though (probably because as I wrote, we have been winning many games before by playing this way) and it’s probably very game-specific since they had Huskar and Oracle.

The photo session we had at the event was super fun. There were a lot of happy fans that wanted us to do poses with them so we had a couple of really good laughs. We did a ballerina pose in one of the pictures which probably looked quite fun ^^. It was all the people there who made it fun by being so happy and nice so a big thanks to everyone who was there and made our day! We heard there were many that requested a second photo session with us that we wanted to do but unfortunately there wasn’t any more time slots available so it wasn’t possible :(. Hopefully there will be more events in Manila!

Big congratulations to OG who just won their second major! It’s one of the teams that really deserves the win so I’m very happy for them!

Cheers,

Akke