Renegades Gratisfaction: “I think sometimes people just freeze up, not reacting off information"

Coming into Katowice few held high expectations of Renegades. However, in reaching the Major playoffs the Australians claimed some respectable scalps and although MIBR proved a level above, heads had been turned.

Throughout their Major winning run, Renegades were the only team to take a map off Astralis and for many informed onlookers, such successes were based on well drilled, simple Counter-Strike. Sitting down with Gratisfaction we discussed the nuts and bolts behind the Australian side and assessed their chances going forward.

Allan: Let's start off by talking about kassad, many including myself hold him in high regard, what is kassad like as a coach?

Gratisfaction: He's a funny dude to hangout with, he is basically a mate. He is a really good strategist and he gets along with Aaron (AZR) super well, they always say they work well together and you can really feel this is the case. Kassad always has good ideas alongside making sure everyone is motivated and happy. Kassad will come up with most of the strats and work through implementing them. This normally happens when we have a theory session, we always have a theory session at the start of practice and then scrims to run the stuff we’ve worked on.

For Renegades I think the aim of the game on the Terrorist side is all about simple Counter-Strike, executed really well. Do you agree and how much work does Renegades put into refining the basics like taking map control for example?

I would say that's pretty true, a lot of the time it's about making sure we get all the basics right, like map control, getting out counter utility and trying to refine these moves. Most of the time we’re just trying to get into position to execute onto the site and instinctively we go through these moves to get to that point. We always talk about these aspects in our theory sessions. When we need to take a certain part of the map we'll look at the current meta and come up with an efficient way to take the control which we know is going to work against a professional player. Then we'll just practice these things over and over again until it's perfect.

During the the early stages of the Major kassad said in an interview that communication and playing out the mid was an issue for Renegades, is this correct?

Our mid round problems mostly occur on certain maps, for some maps everyone is super on point with what to do during the mid round but on others this becomes an issue. During the mid round, I think sometimes people just freeze up, not reacting off information and this happens more in high pressure games. Most commonly these problems arise on the Terrorist side, but sometimes CT as well. At times communication has been really bad, sometimes getting into games is really hard for us. I noticed that during best of threes, on the first map we were constantly losing it. At EPL finals last year after dropping the first maps Alex (kassad) would always have a big speal about how we were not talking enough trying to hype us up. I was like maybe we just do this before the start so that our communication is better and since then we have been firing up for the first map, except for the quarterfinals game here.

I think for the most part Renegades plays fairly standard on the CT side, to succeed in doing this you need good CT team fundamentals such as rotations and timely information plays, would you say Renegades has these traits?

I would say we do have these traits. Justin (jks) for example on A site Mirage is always pushing A ramp or palace if we don't have information towards mid or B. Although, there are certain maps where we can become stagnant, where if we lose map control, we don't take map control somewhere else. When this occurs it always ends up causing problems and losing us the round, then after we say “we need to be pushing here or flashing for info peeks”. We probably could have more set stuff that gets us early map control on the CT side but at the moment we don't and that will probably come up at our next bootcamp.

On CT side my biggest criticism is that I think Renegades plays a little too standard, lacking depth in variation and aggressions, do you agree?

It's obviously something that we need to develop into our game, I guess it just comes with time as well as watching demos. At the moment we are doing the basics, nothing really too flashy. Nobody wants to just throw away a round doing something by themselves. Alex (kassad) is normally the one to implement stuff into the team, so if he isn't implementing aggression into the CT side then the players need to do it.

During your quarterfinal versus MIBR the decision to pick into Dust2 surprised me quite a lot, what was the logic behind this choice?

We had practiced Dust2 and MIBR's track record showed they didn't play it at all. We were thinking, they'll expect us to pick Mirage so we'll try to throw them a curveball by picking Dust2, but then coldzera said that they were going to pick Dust2 thinking we would take Inferno or Mirage.

Talking about the match itself, in this game Renegades struggled to find rounds on the Terrorist side, was it a shock to the system how aggressively MIBR was playing the CT side?

Not really, we've played against enough aggressive players, in Australia everyone is just holding "W" whilst playing so MIBR's aggression wasn't too surprising. We were really sloppy on the T side, we were justs walking across lines and not using our normal utility and just giving away kills. Communication was still good but we just were not winning rounds when it came down to clutch situations like 3v3's and unfortunately they all went in the favour of the Brazilians. For example the round where we split B and TACO got a 4k, we didn't have a flash, we had low money the entire half, a couple hundred dollars more and we probably win the round, but hindsight is 20/20. I think [the pressure on stage] might have affected us slightly, we were all doing weird stuff that we do not normally do and losing rounds because of it.

Only time will tell if the strong showing from Renegades in Katowice is repeatable. From my perspective, this squad has a good basis of fundamentals and refined standard play to build off. Further down the road with a wider playbook under them there is certainly a world in which Gratisfaction's side blossoms and establishes themselves within the top ten sides.

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Photo credit: HLTV.org