Following Envy’s elimination from IEM Chicago partially due to some unfortunate circumstances, we caught up with Sam “s0m” Oh.

The young star discussed the teams results, their progress, Nifty’s health situation at the event, the team dynamic, and more.

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VPEsports: Opening match you guys faced the best team in the world in Team liquid. The result wasn’t very strong but what were your thoughts going into that match?

s0m: Going into the match we knew who we were up against but at the end of day for all of us, it doesn’t matter who we play against we just want to show what we as a team could do. I mean obviously it wasn’t what we expected but there’s other circumstances as you know. Nifty was limited to what he could do. Sure he didn’t perform as well but the main reason why is because he has a fever so it’s hard for him to think on the fly and call on the fly. We studied them a lot. We were doing our best to counter strat or whatever it took.





VPEsports: Now going into the next match, things only got worse as he actually had to sit out and you had to use your coach. The most unfortunate thing I would say about that is how close you guys played MIBR. It’s kind of one of those situations where it’s like “what if?” If he was there, would you guys have been the ones moving on? What are your thoughts on that?

s0m: So for the Liquid match, again Nifty wasn’t feeling so well, but he was able to move and play to just try to help us get the win. Going into MIBR though, which was like for three hours after, he went back to the hospital, actually.

He had a sore throat and upset stomach and high fever, like 110 and he was just puking 24/7. He just got a lot of shots. So going into MIBR, it was obviously a close match. We feel as as if if Nifty were to play we would have had it but we don’t know that for sure. It’s just how I’m feeling obviously. We just did what we can. I mean we had our coach Eley stand in. He’s there with us for all of our dry runs and scrims so he knew most of the strats except that he didn’t know when to call then. So that’s when I took over basically before the MIBR game I IGL’d over all three maps. It was rather puggy and FPL style in a way instead of like set defaults and strats.





VPEsports: This was kind of a big step for you to come into this sort of top level organization. You were a streamer with compLexity. There were talks about you maybe playing with them and now you’re with Envy. What’s that like to go from a streamer and everybody kind of knew who you were for your puggy style like you’ve mentioned and now you’re on a top team competing on the international stage? You’re here going against some of the top teams in the world. What’s that been like for you?

s0m: I mean the change was rather drastic for me. After my qualifier for IEM Sydney 2018 where I played with Swole Patrol, things happened and I separated from them as well. I was getting offers and I just went with Envy as I thought it was the right choice. We went through a lot of hardships but I think now though we’re happy where we are and we just need to grind it out.





VPEsports: What impact does an event like this have? I mean of course you had high hopes coming in and things got all messed up, butdo you guys walk away from this going hey a lot of this was out of our control or is it haunting you?

s0m: No matter what for us, health is number of one. We don’t care about an event or whatever. Health is always number one for our players. It’s just one event, fine, we can just make the next one. We really want to prioritize our health of our players over anything. If he doesn’t fell well and he doesn’t want to play, then so be it. For us as a team we look at this as like, okay unfortunate circumstances, we’ll just do our best and move on. Let’s put this behind us, let’s learn from it. If there’s something in our way that we can’t overcome then so be it.





VPEsports: Going into the whole team dynamic, what are the roles like on your team? Because I know when it first formed you had JDM and you had Nifty so it was like where’s the AWP going. But I’ve seen other players on the team wielding the AWP. We know that you can pick it up, Sonic, Nifty, etc. So what are the roles? Are you just kinda like, hey you take it this round or you take it cause of the spawn or is it a little more set?

s0m: It’s more you if you have the spawn cause almost everyone on his team can AWP. So if we have a spawn we take it. But yeah, we don’t really have set roles. Everyone is versatile, everyone knows what to do. We trade weapons and use whatever guns it takes.





VPEsports: So moving forward, what is the plan with your team. Like I said this is the first like big international event for you guys. Do you have anything on the schedule already?

s0m: For now, I think we’re just focusing on any events we can go to. Whether it be tier one or tier two doesn’t matter. Any LAN we can go to to build the team chemistry and get that LAN experience in and just keep grinding.

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