Natus Vincere have become the first team to make it to the semifinals, as they won the first match of day four in Marseille, quarterfinals day. They did this after beating Renegades and fnatic in the group stage, and are now waiting to see who they will face off against tomorrow.

electronic is no longer bound to the full support role

Denis "⁠electronic⁠" Sharipov has been having a great tournament so far, sporting a 1.38 rating in the six maps his team has played. The Russian player shared his thoughts on his role change and his team's performance against mousesports.

When you saw the draw last night, against mousesports, one of the favorites, did you do anything specific to prepare? Did you think the veto would go the way it did?

We watched 3 or 4 demos yesterday and we told everyone that we can beat them. We prepared only a bit, but it was good. We were pretty sure they would pick Nuke and we knew they wouldn't ban Inferno, because they have a chance to beat us on that map, and if they would have banned it we would have picked Overpass. What we weren't prepared for was their Mirage pick.

When you saw the veto today, how did you feel about going into Mirage? Especially on that first CT half, did you think you'd be so good? Also, did s1mple make any call to play on B, where mousesports were trying to get in abusing Zeus.

We didn't prepare it, as I said, but when they picked it we knew we had more of a chance to beat them on Mirage than we would have to beat them on Nuke. We knew that if they picked Mirage we could beat them, because we already almost beat them on it at StarSeries in Kiev where we went to overtime. We were pretty confident on Mirage, and that's the result. On B, we just played our default combines. s1mple said he wanted to go B or something like that, but I don't remember anything particular.

On Inferno you played really solid, you had a good lead going, something like 15-9, but you let them get all the way to overtime. What happened?

To be honest they played really well. They have good tactics that work against us. We had a good lead, but then we had no money for the buys. We didn't have utility and we had bad weapons. When we went into overtime we said to ourselves "OK, guys, let's go. We will beat them, Inferno is our best map. We have confidence, do a full buy and we'll wreck them."

I was talking to s1mple the other day and he talked about the need to give you more freedom to play. You played well with Russia at WESG where you had the freedom of being in a mix team, and now you're playing well with Na`Vi. How have these changes affected your performance?

When I'm playing now I can be a bit more aggressive. I was full support before, I guess. In my mind, I was a support, but now I'm allowed to be a player that can go get kills and do everything that I want. I do a bit less of a supporting role, while flamie started to do a little bit more.

You're playing C9 or Gambit now. Do you have any preference? Do you know Gambit a bit better since you're both CIS teams?

No, I think both of these teams are strong and they have good preparations coming here. There's no difference, no preference against who we play. We play vs. Gambit the same way we play against any other team, and we're ready for everyone here. We had a really good bootcamp as s1mple said the other day, and we're very confident now. I hope we can do our best tomorrow as well as do our best in the future.