We caught up with Bradley “ANDROID” Fodor following his teams elimination from IEM Chicago. Playing Team Liquid in their opener was rough but having to suddenly play their elimination match without their in-game leader Noah “Nifty” Francis made things a little worse.

ANDROID walks us through the situation, the teams mentality, his break from competing after compLexity, and more.

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VPEsports: Rough showing for you guys, but some circumstances out of your control. So walk me through what the mindset was coming into the event and if you had any knowledge about Nifty’s sickness coming in?

ANDROID: We felt really good coming into this event. We were well prepared, had been grinding and grinding and grinding. In terms of Noah’s health, we had no idea, he had no idea. I think it was literally a last day kind of thing. He just became kind of quiet, said he had a fever. Then the next day it just got really bad.

But we felt we could go really far in this event and I mean MIBR doing really well right now, clearly, hurts a little more now.

VPEsports: That was something I touched on in an interview with s0m. It was one of those situations where you lost to Team Liquid, the best team in the world, which was probably going to go in their direction regardless but the performance could have been better – and then you go against MIBR and now he’s completely out. You guys play MIBR so close, you go to OT, you take it all three maps and it’s one of those situations where you have to say “what if?” If Nifty was there, do you believe you guys would have moved forward in the event?

ANDROID: Well definitely. Inferno is a really strong map for us and we figured we’d beat MIBR on that map. Mirage is a little weirder without an IGL. Sam stepped up with some pug strats and stuff but it didn’t really work out.

Train was really hard to deal with, we were up 13-5 even without our caller. But on T-side we really weren’t sure what to do agains the double AWP and zews having an autosniper also. We just had no answers for that. Little late we kind of figured it out, got to 14 rounds. I feel like I threw that last round. I had the chance to close it out but tried to be the hero. Still stings right now.

But yeah, if we had Noah I think for sure we probably would have been on the stage right now. G2, not sure how they lost.

VPEsports: Do you think this MIBR’s playstyle is different because of this situation, and I don’t mean just firepower lost because of coldzera. It seems like they’re playing more loose, changing things up more…

ANDROID: Yeah it’s kind of like our situation with Zach. Zach just said go have fun, no pressure on anyone. So everyone just makes these plays, there’s no hesitating like you normally would, no ones thinking of the consequences which is probably how they’re playing.

But they had their IGL, FalleN, so they kind of had the structure as well.

VPEsports: They had something to fall back on if the puggy strats aren’t working…

ANDROID: Yeah.

VPEsports: Going back more to the beginning or your time with Envy – you went from compLexity where you guys had a great run before things fell apart, then you were teamless for a short while and now you’re with Envy. Walk me through that time in between?

ANDROID: I got removed around like Christmas I think, and for like three months I was teamless. I figured I’d get another offer so I kind of just hung low. I had a buyout and stuff and it kind of got difficult cause my buyout was kind of high at first so a couple teams didn’t want to pick me up.

Luckily Noah messaged me about Envy. I didn’t really do anything during that period of time so I was pretty excited to get a message from Noah. With the whole karrigan situation, if he didn’t leave I probably wouldn’t have gotten the offer. When he left they needed like three players so luckily I got the offer.

VPEsports: With the new lineup, you guys almost pieced together players who were let go by their previous teams. I don’t want to say a band of misfits, but what’s the feel on the team? Do you all have a chip on your shoulder because of that?

ANDROID: That’s what I like about this team specifically, no one has an ego. No ones trying to up the other people or gets mad when we’re losing so we can easily come back. We’re like a family, no one is trying to be that star player, everyone’s modest, and it’s just really easy to become better when you have a team mentality like that.

VPEsports: Again something I talked about with s0m and something I want your viewpoint on is your roles in the team. It seems like they’re very dynamic as you have a whole team that will pick up the AWP. It seems everyone is doing a lot of everything.

ANDROID: I think a lot of teams now are trying to mimic what Liquids doing. If you feel comfortable on this map depending on where you’re playing then you AWP. So we’re kind of trying to replicate what Liquids doing in a way. So any role, like we don’t have a set entry – obviously sometimes we want Sam to go in first because he’s really good at it but no one should be like telling someone to go in first.

On compLexity we would be telling yayster to go in first but I don’t think the game should be played like that.

VPEsports: So your actual goal is to be very dynamic and your players roles…

ANDROID: It’s just so hard to counter strat. If you look at Liquids demo, it’s like Stewie’s AWPing here and then another person AWPing here and you can’t get notes on them because they’re so dynamic…as you saw on Vertigo (laughs).

VPEsports: Moving forward with the team, how does this event effect you guys moving forward?

ANDROID: I’m feeling really good about this team because of the progression. As long as we’re going up, that’s all that I care about. Every event so far we’ve been looking better and better so honestly I’m excited to see where this goes.

It doesn’t really matter, if we’ve got to prove ourselves at this event or the next event we’ll do it.

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