The first semifinal at Oakland went the way of NiP, as the Swedes were able to take Overpass despite going down by a large margin early on. Despite losing Cache, the Patrik "⁠f0rest⁠" Lindberg & co.'s exploits on the B site of Inferno on the attacking side ultimately gave them a spot in the final.

NiP will defend their IEM Oakland title tomorrow in the grand final

f0rest, who had a huge impact on Overpass against SK, talks us through some of the keys of the match, the team's new mental coach, Jens, and the state of NiP.

A short documentary about the impact of your mental coach was just released, could you maybe tell us how that applies to today?

What we've done with our mental coach, Jens, is that we're starting to prepare mentally, a lot. That's putting ourselves in every imaginable scenario before the match starts, and if that scenario comes forth, how to tackle it. We go through every scenario, if we lose pistols, if we lose a 1vs4, if we're down a map, whatever... we're really prepared for any situation that will come our way and that shows. Especially for example on the first half of Overpass in which we were down 1-7 and ended up winning 8-7.

We're starting to feel really comfortable in whatever situation we end up in, and that's the work he's doing, and he's doing a great job. It's a new experience for all of us, we're doing our best, and I think it's really starting to show. We're getting some results from it so we're just going to keep at it. It's just a lot of preparation. Really what I'm just trying to say is that a lot of preparation goes into it.

Overpass, as you said, you started down 1-7. It was particularly fer, it seems, who was disrupting your play early on with his CT-side aggression, how did you deal with that?

I think most of the teams by now should know fer is going to push somewhere. It's easy to say, "yeah, he's gonna push," but he's a great player with great intuition on where and when to push. It was a bit frustrating, but that's something we're good at, holding down our frustration. Anyways, what we realized was that they were giving us a lot of space on long A and towards mid, so we kind of shifted the momentum from B. We took GeT_RiGhT from B, put him on A, and what we pretty much did was put five guys on A as our T-side standard, using that side of the map. It was a good call and it ended up giving us the result we needed.

After the switch, you guys locked it down on the CT side, what made it so easy for you to read SK?

I know draken and REZ have so much pressure over on A, but we had intel on TACO playing solo towards B unless they go through the hub, right outside of door. If they were around there we knew they were going to hit towards B. We had that solid read, but the good thing about our CT side is that we're unpredictable. We try to do a lot of stuff together and to switch it up, and mix it up, and I think what makes our CT side strong is that we have such good communication. Everyone is talking all the time and giving ideas and we're rotating really good and clean. We're very comfortable on CT side in Overpass and I think it shows as well.

Cache, your pick, went the way of SK, by a fairly large margin...

Yeah, Cache started similarly to Overpass. It was a close first half, although we could have done much better... Cache is one of our better maps, or it used to be at least, I think we were just overthinking a bit how they played on CT. Running into a lot of angles against FalleN and coldzera, they were picking us apart with the AWPs.

Going into CT we won the pistol, everything felt good, we started to get into the groove, but we lost an unfortunate anti-eco that threw us off a bit. We were still mentally there and ready to go, but we just couldn't find the kills we wanted, the situations needed to really get it going, so they just ran away the way we did on Overpass.

Finally, one of the keys to the victory on Inferno was the constant abuse on the B site, was that something you knew going into the match or did you figure it out on-the-fly?

That's something we prepared for the day before. SK tend to play defensively on B, and once they push back on B we have a good strat to remove them from the site so what we had to do was to take banana control, and push FalleN and fer back. They did manage to trade us a bit but when they didn't trade us and we got control of banana and could move the whole squad up and start to line up the nades, we just executed the way we wanted to and everything just went according to plan.

Oakland was the last big event you won, but you guys have been making playoffs at events and so on, which is something people don't always realize. Despite missing out on the Minor and so on, where do you think you sit right now amongst the top teams?

Coming into this tournament, or even prior to this tournament, we've done a lot of work, and I really mean a lot of work, preparing and practicing and doing all the mental parts as well. We put in the hours, we really put in a lot of hours, and it's starting to show here as well. We don't mess up as much anymore, I believe we're a really solid team at the moment. We've been doing all the hard work and we'll keep doing the hard work, and it shows. We went head-to-head with SK here, and we're most likely going to play FaZe tomorrow, and we're going to be ready to play. We're not an easy team to go by, that's what I believe. It's going to take a lot of them to get through us. That's our main goal, here. We don't just want to give away the win if they win, they better have beaten us at our best. That's our mentality.