After missing out on the quarterfinals of the League of Legends World Championship, ahq e-Sports Club’s Chou “An” Chun-An talked to Slingshot’s Vince Nairn and Andrew Kim (through an interpreter) about the run to worlds, falling short of goals and carrying the weight of an entire region.

Andrew Kim: First thing I have to ask you is that your style of AD Carry has always been very aggressive, but in that last game against EDG, we saw a kind of passive side of you that we haven’t seen before. Can you extrapolate a little bit on why?

Chou “An” Chun-An: Last year my conditioning was good, so I was willing to go for it, but this year it feels like somehow my conditioning is not there and made me feel like I might not be as good the other team and that led to me play the way I did.

Vince Nairn: How would you sum up your year over all? Obviously not being able to make it out of groups is probably disappointing, but how would you say your year went as a whole?

CCA: It feels like I didn’t hit my full potential this year. Just pretty average.

VN: Why do you think that is? What were the things that were difficult for you this year?

CCA: It feels like I’m not as focused this year. When I realized (this), it was already too late, so I didn’t perform as well.

AK: When you were going up against EDG it was down to the wire; whoever wins goes forward, whoever loses has to go home. What were the conversations or thought processes of you and your teammates before the EDG game took place?

CCA: We knew that it would probably be our last game, and that we would probably get our main champs, so we just wanted to leave it all out on the stage and play to our best abilities, without regrets.

VN: You guys have been one of the more well known, well respected teams from your region for a while now. How have you guys try to carry that pride with you when you get to international competitions?

CCA: This year we didn’t really perform as well, and we hope to be better next year and come back to worlds.

AK: A running theme for this year’s worlds seems to be sickness. We have a lot of players, a lot of coaches, even support staff saying that they’re getting sick. Did anyone on your team also get sick? If they were, how did you contain it? If they weren’t how did you make sure no one gets sick?

CCA: Yeah, there was two or three teammates on my team that got sick. I think the best way to prevent it probably the guys working out more.

VN: Is it difficult when you’re teammates are sick? Because you’re playing a lot, you’re practicing and you’re trying to get ready for worlds but you don’t want to be around them too much because you don’t want to get sick. What’s difficult about that situation?

CCA: We make them wear face masks and just talk through teamspeak it wasn’t that big of a deal.

AK: Setting aside the performances or games you were not happy with, how was your worlds experience for 2016? Has it been enjoyable? Were you particularly looking forward to something when you knew you were coming to America to compete?

CCA: We actually spent a lot of time practicing for this worlds, we went to Korea and all that. But in the end our errors and mistakes cost us, so we deeply regret our performance.

VN: How does this experience compare to any other time you’ve been to worlds?

CCA: It feels like the average team strength of this worlds was way better than before.

Cover photo courtesy of Riot Games