Luis “peacemaker” Tadau is Team Liquid's well-known Brazilian coach and he helped the American squad pull off one of ESL One Cologne 2016's biggest upsets as they took down Natus Vincere 2-1 in the quarterfinals.

peacemaker spoke to theScore esports right after his team’s big victory about how they’re improved map pool was instrumental to their win and s1mple’s one-off Major with the team.

Editor's Note: This interview was conducted prior to Fnatic's match against Gambit Gaming.

Dust II will always be an NA map, but Cobble seems to be NA's new map of choice. What are your thoughts on that?

Actually when we came to this tournament and the previous tournament, ECS, our map pool was pretty weak. Like you said, Liquid only knew how to play Dust II, Cache, and that was my biggest challenge coming to the scene. I was like "Yeah, we gotta improve our map pool, or else we don't have a chance going into this tournament."

Cobble is my favourite map. With the Tempo Storm guys back in the day, we did an awesome job on Cobble, so I had a lot of strats on my mind. All I did when I joined this team was like "Hey guys, I know some strats on Cobble, if you guys trust me we can do it," and pretty much the guys were like "Yeah, let's do it."

Definitely Cobble is a very strong map for us, but in general we've improved our map pool a lot.

I know that TSM and OpTic in particular are also very good on Cobble. Were they your key practice partners?

Yeah, TSM and OpTic are really good on Cobble. I feel like TSM were even better than us on Cobble before this boot camp, I think it's like one of their best maps or something, and Cobble is, for me, a map that you can do a lot of fakes. You can do a lot of strats, you can change the pace, like play fast, play slow.

OpTic as well have always been good on Cobble, but nowadays I feel like their map pool is more like Train and Overpass. I feel like they kind of gave up on Cobble, but they should definitely work on that because they used to be very good.

We didn't really practice against them because we jumped in the boot camp in Europe, so we never had the time to practice, but back in the days, whenever I practiced against those teams, they were very good. NA, like Cloud9 for example, they have an amazing Cobble as well. So yeah, definitely NA is working on Cobble.

Switching to Nuke, which was the second map, I actually talked to shox about that map a little and my read was kind of like "I think Nuke is going to be one of those secret maps that's gonna be really key in the best-of-threes," but he didn't really think that was the case. How do you feel about Nuke though?

Nuke, I mean all the teams are adapting and trying different styles to see how to play Nuke, and in my opinion Nuke is still kind of CT-sided. Even though we have a lot of spots to watch and there's a lot of things to worry on the new Nuke, I still think that the CTs...because it's still very close range as well.

In my opinion, Nuke is pretty similar as 1.6 and Source as well. It's still a bit CT-sided, but the changes they made kind of help the Ts. For example, now as Ts, you can go from Catwalk to Heaven very fast. The boost on Silo is very easy, so yeah, I think for us it's a good map.

We're trying different stuff on Nuke. Teams don't have an A-execute, but we just brought an A-execute. We're trying to do it, hoping for the best and it kinda worked. I feel like the teams will start to adapt and I think that all the teams are trying to play Nuke nowadays.

I feel comfortable about this new Nuke.

You guys are going to be facing the winner of Gambit and Fnatic. What are your feelings towards that matchup?

Fnatic is very strong, they have been pretty good in every single Major and I know that they are very hungry for this Major. They especially really want to beat SK, so they really want to hit the Finals.

Gambit really impressed me in this tournament, like for example their captain, hooch, was an unknown guy, like nobody knew about him, and he's doing a very good job. I don't know how much input their coach has as well, but they've been playing really good. So whoever we face, it's gonna be tough, definitely.

With s1mple in the lineup, it's kind of a one-off for the Major, and there's a lot of pressure on Pimp coming into the lineup afterwards. Are you guys gonna miss s1mple?

Well, I'm gonna be completely honest with you, when I knew that we would play with s1mple these two tournaments, my biggest challenge was... I mean, I heard a lot of bad things about this guy, and people trash talk him a lot. But when I came to the scene, I was like "I don't care about what people said about him, I wanna try to fix this guy."

To be honest we had a couple problems during our boot camps. He's a very strong person and he likes to do things his way, so he's very tough to deal with. But in the end he realized that I like him and I want him at his best.

We have such a good chemistry right now, between me and him, and he trusts me 100-percent. After boot camp we were like, "let's do it," and he's very calm right now. I would say he's one of the most consistent players in our team right now, and he's very calm, like I never saw him that calm before, not even in practice. In high pressure situations he's doing very good.