Interview: 99Damage-Interview with Flipsid3-Mastermind 08.07.2016, 14:00

99Damage: First of all congratulations on making Legends for the first time, where you suprised to lose your own Mappick to NiP?

Andrew ' B1ad3 ' Gorodenskiy : Thank you for the congratulations. First of all we didn't expect them to ban train so it was a good move from them, we wanted to pick train. We expected them to veto overpass. We didn't expect to lose overpass as our pick but we where a bit shaky. I don't know why we are always shaky against higher tier teams at majors. So thats why we needed a best of three. We knew that we're gonna be shaky against every better opponent here. So for example when we played against optic we don't feel the pressure, we just played our own game. We even did some mistakes there to. We lost overpass because we made a lot of mistakes. You know when you have pressure to make a decsision you want to do the easiest one to get out of the situation, to escape the situation and relieve the pressure. So thats why we lost, it was very close but we even lost ecos on CT-Side.

What was different on Cache because you absolutely demolished NiP on Cache, which was their Mappick and generally is quite a good map for NiP.

There was nothing different, we didn't practice Cache at all, we just know how to play the Map. It is the easiest Map in the Mappool even easier then dust2. you don't need to do sth special you just need to know what the opponent is doing, we knew what they where doing on cache. The teams that are trying to pick cache and have cache in their mappool as their main map pick are making a mistake i think. Cache is not a map where you can outplay your opponent unless he doesnt know what he is doing, even more so than dust2. Its A, B, Mid it's a small map and you dont have complex entraces like on Cobble or Overpass, it's easy. It's all about skill, aim and actions as a team so we played very well as a team on ct-side. we just knew their t-approach, how they tried to execute, what they where trying to do, we knew everything. Also waylander played really well on A-Site, individually we all played very good.

Mirage must have felt really lucky as a random map because you are generally very good on Mirage. Did you feel like the randomizer played in your favor?

Absolutely, randomizer gave us the best map we could get. So when we saw Mirage we where like yes, thats what we want. We have a huge chance to win with Mirage as the 3rd Map. The moment Mirage was selected we had huge confidence we could win the whole matchup. NiP recently played really bad on Mirage, they lost to godsent, they lost to immortals at dreamhack so they lost a lot of Mirage and despite that they suprised us a lot on CT-Side. When they play CT they do very good retakes of mid and connector with really good timing. Not just like flash and peak at the same time. They used proper timings, the right moments it was really good. If they hadn't done that it would have been 11:4 for us on T-Side. So that was really suprising to us. But still 8 rounds was enough for us.

Historically ever since your team joined Flipsid3 you made it to every Major, you are very consistent in your qualifications, yet you always failed to get anything done beyond that. You never made the playoffs, this is your first time. Why do you think you had problems in the past, playing that last match to get into the playoffs.

We where never considered favorites in our groups. Our skill and experience was always enough to make it to the major but it was never enough to make it past the groupstage teams are very high class at the major. We where losing against very good teams usually. We had a good chance to break the groupstage in cologne 2015 where we won against mousesports first and lost to envyus. Then we played against keyd stars and we had three matchpoints at 15:12, we could have been legends a year ago but we just overwhelmed ourselves and thought thats the win and stopped focusing and so we lost against the core of the current SK Gaming. Also we didnt have a stable lineup. S1mple made a lot of problems, we always had s1mple, davcost, s1mple, davcost. One Major we even tried to prepare with davcost, it was in cluj and we failed a lot but I think we failed because of bad pcs. In cluj everything was bad from pcs to monitors it was very bad and we couldnt aim properly. Here in cologne the PCs are the best of all majors, thats very good.

You spoke about davcost and davcost always seemed to be a very good player whenever he stood in for your team. He was standing out, maybe even without the problems s1mple had. Why is it that he never actually joined flipsid3 and kept playing with what seemed like lesser teams.

First of all davcost was only for majors, when s1mple left we tried to play with davcost because we didnt have time to find a new player and after that we didnt play good in cluj and thats why we gathered, made a meeting about what we are going to do next because cluj was a failure. Some players didnt want to play with davcost, i was confident to give him a chance and said give him a chance. The main problem is that he is an awper and we have an awper. As a player he has good potential and I have been saying this. Players said we should change players eventhough I said we should give him a chance with the rifle but most of the others wanted to change players. It was also the end of the year and we had a lot of time.

Whenever flipsid3 actually makes rosterchanges, most of the time it seems like to remove a toxic player or a disturbance in team environment. bond1k left but he talked about it before, obviously s1mple, it alawys seems like the player you get to replace those is less skilled but better for team environment. Do you think thats the right way to build a stable lineup or do you think thats the reason why you lacked skill in the past?

In my oppinion environment is more important than skill. People can be very skilled, top of the world but they won't be friends, they will argue a lot. So enviroment is much more important. Yes we lost s1mple, then we lost bond1k but we felt better when bond1k left because he was always arguing and thought that we where the problem not he. I told him he was part of the problem to and he has to work on his mistakes to fix them. He didn't want to accept that and I think he just thought he is a really good players and he deserved a better team thats his problem. He was focusing on this one idea like I am better I am better I want to find something better. As a team we need to work as a team, we need a team player to work with teammates. In general yes, environment is one of the most important things. For example Gambit, they are all playing for a long time, 3 or 4 of them know each other for almost 6 or 7 years like NaVi. Its very important to have a guy in which you are confident as a person.

Gambit recently removed waylander, yet it seems like he is working very well in flipsid3. Do you know what the problems where with waylander in gambit and why he got removed?

He was removed because he didnt want to accept his mistakes. So hes a new unexperienced player. Its all about how you approach this guy and try to improve his game. Set his mind to a proper mindset. Tell him he has to work etc. and if you don't have corporation and synergy with the new player than he will leave the team. Waylander has the same mistakes that he had in gambit but I just try to listen to him and to explain a lot of stuff to him. Not only tell him what he has to do and thats it, you have to explain to him why he should do it because he will always say "I don't want to do this, Thats not right, this is stupid etc." Hes not experienced but he has his own vision so if you tell him to do something without explaining it he'll have a conflict in his mind between his own vision and what the team needs from him so you have to communicate a lot with him. Thats what we try to do with waylander in our team. We try to explain to him why we do the things we do.

You are known as a very tactical team, you are a very tactical ingame leader, you are very experienced player. Your style is similar to Ex6tenZ, maybe less execution-heavy. Whenever you seem to play a better team individually you always seem to find a way to be competitive. Why is taht and whats the secret behind your success against better teams?

Well, the day that we will be equal with other teams we will just outplay them but nowadays a lot of teams are better individually so we just try to do proper things. When teams are equal in skill, in aim, then the team with tactics and strategy will always win. I don't think we are similar to ex6tenz, he is doing a lot of strats. We try to play more from mapcontrol. I'm doing this from 1.6, Mapcontrol is the only proper game approach in counter-strike so if you can outaim your opponent you can just play the mapcontrol all the time. Just do it properly with all microfeatures and details, flashes, smoke, teamplay, waiting, timings. You need to talk a lot to improve and adapt to new tendencies what teams try to involve. So what we are trying to do mostly is mapcontrol also trying to use the posibilities that the game gives to us. For example if you have a smoke, the smoke is one of the most efficient nades in counter-strike, you can do a lot with it so we try to use the opportunities the game is trying to give to use. If the roundtime changes, we are trying to adapt. They adjust smokes, we try to adapt. If you have a situation you always want to take maximum advantage of the potential you have. If you have a flash always go with a flash why would you go without flash. If you have 3 vs 1 why would you go 1-1-1, he cant outaim 3 guys at the same moment. With this stuff you just have to take full advantage of the game situation.

So western teams have a lot of callouts that are just names for positions and i've heard that your teams callouts are quite different. You are calling in sectors and numbers, could you explain this to us in a couple of sentences?

In 1.6 we had this, we tried to split the whole map in areas, zones like this one is number 3, 4, 5 this little spot where he can hide can be 55 and 66 etc. so we used to have names in 1.6 and in CS:GO not a lot of players came from 1.6 but those who came used the same stuff. Some of them knew and thats why we don't call all the spots with numbers. For example we have delpan on mirage, so CT-Box we call delpan. Connector is connector. We split it, we have numbers for some areas and callouts for others. So if a mate calls hes on 10, i check it and hes on 8 i can call it and it helps the others creating an image in their head without seenig the opponent.

With making it to legends, are you satisfied or do you think you can go further?

We think from map to map, we had our focus on groupstage. We need to focus now and try to forget that we made it into playoffs. You know when you want to achieve something really badly and when you do it you get complacent and in quarterfinals if you lose a round you don't care as much because you already made it to legends. You always need to do your best to win any match. We will try to prepare a gameplan. Theres always a chance to win. We are not desperate tomorrow. We will fight tomorrow.

Congratulations again on the win and thank you for the interview!

Thank you.