At the PGL Major Krakow, Natus Vincere lost their opening match against G2, throwing away a 12-3 lead after switching over to the Terrorist side of Overpass. The CIS side bounced back today, defeating their regional rivals FlipSid3 on Train 16-9.

Edward was saving for his nades for late in the round against FlipSid3

After the match, we chatted with Ioann "⁠Edward⁠" Sukhariev about their recent results and young regional talent.

I want to get a few your thoughts on the Cologne run and that event in general. You made it to the semi's but couldn't get past Cloud9, one of the surprises tournament. Leaving that tournament, what was the feeling like for you and what do you think about the result?

At the beginning, we have decided to have Cologne as a bootcamp, as practice before the Major. So it was nice to manage semi's, and Cloud9 was a little bit better than us in the semi's because we felt pressure or something, we didn't play an amazing game.

The first game you had here was against G2, you faced them in Cologne as well. It again came down to Overpass, tell me a bit about the first half, it seemed like you had their Terrorist side figured out? Tell me a bit about that.

We knew it was going to be Nuke or Overpass, which we played before in the quarters in Cologne. So we managed to win the first half 12-3 and after that, I don't know why but we started to feel overconfident. It was chaos, such a mess on our T side. We were doing so stupid, mini mistakes, and they did a comeback.

Coming into today and facing FlipSid3, first of all, tell me about the feelings facing a B1ad3 and a regional team?

It's always nice to play against them, we knew each other very well. Someone from my team told me that we won the last 11 games against them. So we have a good statistic, that is nice.

Talking about his style, the beginning of the game, their first buy rounds were very, very slow...

If I'm not wrong, they ran out of time in the first two buy rounds. (laughs) That was kind of funny to me.

So what are your thoughts on that playstyle and those rounds in particular?

I knew it was going to be like that, I knew it before the game that it was going to be like that. When B1ad3 plays on the big stage, the big events, he always plays very, very slow. We knew that, I was saving my nades because I knew that they are not going to rush anywhere and that is it.

When you played with Zeus in Na`Vi before, you used to play a similar style, to a degree. What do you think are the differences?

It wasn't the same style, we were always balancing some fast rounds, some fast game with the slow of course. So by me, it's not the same.

In the later part of the half, it seemed like FlipSid3 stepped up the pace, they got some rounds. Do you think that was maybe the plan all along, to get you used to slow rounds and then speeding it up?

There was only one round that we were supposed to win, it was a 2-on-4, they came out B and WorldEdit sniped us down. We were going out from connector and it was free kills for him. After that we saved two guns and they won three rounds in the row. But during the whole game we felt pretty comfortable and calm and we knew were going to win anyway. So it wasn't bad.

Then came the pause, how much impact did that have, did you have any problems keeping focus since it lasted about half an hour?

flamie started playing really well after the pause because he started to feel power in his PC (laughs). That was all the difference I guess.

One thing to mention, at this tournament we have two players from CIS that have been catching some attention: mir and electronic. What are your thoughts about them, you just played against electronic, I don't think you played against Vega at recent times. What have you seen from them?

We practiced against Vega many times, and mir always played well against us in practice, so I know him as a very good player. electronic as well, he is really motivated, you can see it by the games they play. So both are really good players.