We spoke with Vincent "⁠Brehze⁠" Cayonte at StarSeries i-League Season 5 after NRG picked up their first win of the tournament, eliminating VG.Flash.

NRG had a rocky start to the tournament in Kiev, Ukraine, suffering defeats to Liquid and North. Damian "⁠daps⁠" Steele's team did show some prowess on Overpass, though, on which they dominated the Danish team.

Brehze admitted that his team does play differently in practice

Day three started with NRG taking on VG.Flash, and despite the fairly close scorelines, 16-14 on Mirage and 16-10 on Overpass, the series seemed in control of the North Americans overall.

In the opening game you played Liquid, it wasn't a great showing from you guys, was it just the first game on LAN, a lack of individual performances, what do you think was the key thing you struggled with there?

We always have a tough time starting off at a LAN, we always start slow, our communication is always really slow, and we weren't hitting shots, so overall, Liquid just played 10 times better than us that day.

Talking about the communication on LAN issue, I guess that is something a lot of new teams, or new players at least, have to adapt to. Is there something you do to kind of practice it, make it better?

Yeah, it always tends to happen on LAN instead of online because of the pressure here, the environment is completely different than it is online. To practice that we just have to come to more of these LANs and play - and not get nervous, pretty much. Our comms tend to get so slow because everyone is not talking as much.

The North game you played had three one-sided maps, which is weird in a way, but was it more of the same in terms of communication? You could see a lack of it as things were falling apart after getting entry kills and stuff like that. Was it similar to the Liquid game?

Yeah, 100%. There are rounds that we would never lose online but we lose on LAN, and that just comes down to the communication, when we are in the 2v2s, 3v3s, 1v1s. Just knowing how to play it and not getting nervous at the moment, pretty much.

Coming against VG.Flash, they are a fairly new team and a Chinese, Asian team, so people don't get exposed to them that much. What was your preparation going into that match, did you get to watch any demos as a team and what were you expecting from the game?

Yeah, our coach and daps watched a few demos, but we didn't want to anti-strat them too hard because we know that in terms of skill, we feel that we have the better players. In terms of the matchup, we just wanted to play our own game, be free and work off each other.

Did you notice anything specific that is off the classic style of teams that you play in NA and Europe. Something off-meta, different things that they did?

They are very aggressive, their playstyle is very random, you never really know what they are doing. That caught us off guard a couple of times, other than that it's pretty much the same.

So that was the second half of Overpass, their T side, you getting caught off guard and in the end, you did a bit of the same, pushing aggressively and shutting it down?

Yeah, taking the fights that we can because we know that we have the better players, just being aggressive the whole time, not giving them that much room to work with.

I have to ask you about the TACO quote from earlier in the tournament, about the way you practice. Can you give me your thoughts on it?

We were wondering what he was leaning towards when he said that, but I guess we do kind of play differently in practice. I don't know what else to say about it. (laughs)

You got your first win, moving forward, what's the mentality like for you guys?