Jerax - Not Satisfied

I'm here with Jerax from Team Liquid. How are you feeling after your match against Na'Vi?

I'm feeling well. Obviously, a best of one is not what you want to do but we managed to win it. Kind of in a lucky fashion as we got all of the heroes we wanted to play.

It's been a rough path for all of you in TI so far but how was it to come together as a team and beat Na'Vi in the best of 1 after having such a difficult group stage?

We are of course very happy doing this. We are not really satisfied the way we played but just winning this one game means a lot to us. We basically just want to play good Dota and winning itself doesn't really matter but if we play good Dota it should win games. That’s what we believe in.

Walk me through how that game went from your perspective.

I think what we talked about in the game is that their cores don't match our cores at all mid game or late game. They relied on completely snowballing the game which is hard because we had a bounty hunter. They actually didn't have the BH, which they normally had with their line-up. It kind of slows down the enchantress as well so the only option for them was to snowball the game and I don't think they could do it against how we play. We played very defensive and stalled the game. It's very annoying to play against the way we played that Naga game.

Bo1's are most likely incredibly stressful to play. Has the win over Na'Vi removed some of the stress that the team has been feeling?

Everybody hates bo1 formats and it's very stressful to start off with something like this. Overcoming this match is very good and I think in a bo3 it will be a completely different environment. We will feel much more confident and I think we will adjust much better.

You made some pretty key saves with Shadow Demon. During a close game what do you do, what do you think of in order to position yourself properly to make those plays?

I have to look at the team fight picture, for example, that game they had Void and we had Naga sleeping the Void during chronosphere so we can basically wait for them to chrono someone and then we use sleep. This is super easily done because naga is not going to be in the fight and I think this is the stupid thing of the game, they can't actually win unless we messed up. If Naga ended up in the chrono I would just disrupt the naga and there was no counter.

We had talked to you after the groups and everyone seemed fairly nervous, when they showed the team in the tunnel before your game against Na'Vi you seemed much more relaxed. What happened over those couple of days?

We played a lot of scrims with Chinese teams like Wings and EHOME and we understood what kind of change we had to do to overcome the weakness we had. It was a lot about us, not really about the hero picks we had that was the issue. We just needed confidence from these scrims to come to this game and play the game the way we performed in the practice games.

Fata mentioned you wanted to take advantage of Na'Vi's aggressiveness and you touched on this already but did you have a pretty clear idea of what Na'Vi would be drafting?

Yeah, I feel like they don't really have many options like we do. They are very similar in every game and do this Enchantress and mid lanes that snowball. I think their playstyle is very predictable so I think we took advantage in that game.

Another thing that worked for you is that you were either breaking smokes or they were only catching you with them, I think they even solo chrono'd you once. Does that ever get frustrating or do you look at the bigger picture of the game?

When you think about the bigger picture, I think all these small things were pointless, they only delayed the game and we were really happy because the game just dragged on. It's exactly what they didn't want to do. They need to push their advantage all the time and chronosphering a support is not really doing that. All the lanes were always pushed out.

Next you play against either EG or Newbee and the games from this point forward are only going to get harder, how do you keep yourself focused?

The important thing is that you follow the structure you have built before and you remember you have the four guys with you and you're doing it together. You need to do this together. It won’t work out if you try to do it alone. I think that it's a lot of pressure just believing what you have done together in the last 10 months and what you can do.

How do you relieve some of that pressure?

I have my ways of relaxing. I do meditation at times and I think it helps me a lot. Just doing nothing for awhile and not thinking about anything.

How much did it affect Liquid when Blitz left the coaching role?

We had to overcome the problems ourselves instead of relying on him. I think we did a good job transitioning that we only had us for that, and Heen for the actual in-game play-wise things. I think we have done great things, to do this together and overcome the issue of not having this mental coach.

Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me and good luck against either Newbee or EG.

Thanks for having me here.