After BIG began the qualifier with a loss to Cloud9 on Cobblestone and survived a tough Tengri encounter, Fatih "⁠gob b⁠" Dayik and company surprised Immortals and Liquid to qualify for the Major with a 3-1 record.

gob b's side now have two weeks to prepare for the Major

We had a chat with the in-game leader to find out what BIG's journey to the PGL Major was like from his team's point of view and what the team will focus on before the Major rolls around.

At the beginning of the qualifier, you had a lot of issues on Cobblestone, losing to Cloud9 and barely scraping by Tengri, talk to me about the struggles at the start and what you figured out for the latter games...

It wasn't the map, I think, it was that we didn't play as well as we could, we didn't communicate and we played with a lot of fear. After that, we had talks and we still had confidence. We wanted to play a different map, also, we felt like we are really strong on Cache, we practiced it a lot and we knew it was going to be an important map.

In the end, we were happy that the map veto changed so that Cobblestone isn't in every time, even though I think Cobblestone wasn't the problem. But it's better to change and have a different map. After we played so bad against Cloud9, I rated our performance 2/10 probably, and even though it was 2, we could have won, so we realized that and said "hey, it's going to be easy, then." We had a little bit of luck that we knew which map we were going to play every time, so we had a good gameplan and, yeah, the rest is history.

Did it come down to preparation against Immortals and Liquid, then?

Yeah, for sure, if I explain the game plan with my heart, I believe so much in it and everyone believes in it, then we're all together and on one side. We know that even though probably the plan isn't perfect, we know we're prepared and everyone feels better. And if we feel that we know what to do, then we have better clutches, we're more calm, we have better communication, which we didn't have on both Cobble games. That's why it was so hard to win at least one of them, the others looked a bit easier.

You aren't going to ESL One Cologne, so you have quite a lot of time to prepare compared to a lot of these other Major teams, what will be the focus?

The focus will be the same like for the Minor and for the Major qualifier, we will see which opponents are at the Major, we will think about maps - we just practiced four maps for this event, even though people banned different maps against us that we didn't practice. kakafu and me were just talking about maps and found out which maps were important and we decided to just play four maps and concentrate on those, and we knew that we could beat anyone on these four maps with a good game plan.

We didn't practice other maps and a lot of the time our opponents banned of the maps we didn't play, so it was always good. We just played the format is what I wanted to say, at the Major it will be different, so we need to put a bit more hours in and we will see. We will be prepared well, but we won't pressure ourselves as much, we have nothing to lose. We will just keep doing what we're doing, because it's going great at the moment.

Will you be able to keep improving, continue this upwards trajectory that you've had since you put this team together at the start of the year?

Yeah, for sure. Again, we didn't show up with five players in one game,we always have two or three playing fine, the others playing okay, but if everyone plays really great - we didn't have that yet - of course we can improve. I know it's not that easy to show up, I know every other team also doesn't have all five players playing good all the time. But if we can find a way to manage that...

We had a cool trick, sometimes nex is very silent, so if I say this keyword "re-focus", that means "just go again on your place and come back into the game". Sometimes, he falls into a hole and falls deeper and deeper, then we tried to implement this and it worked really well, I would say, he had impact after he had a bad start. Sometimes he's falling into this hole, but we as teammates need to help him to get out of this hole or not let him fall in it alone. We weren't just working on our maps, we also worked on psychological things, and try to improve ourselves like "if you call in this kind of voice, you are a better player, why aren't you calling with this kind of voice." It's hard work, but it paid off.