We spoke to Aleksandr "⁠s1mple⁠" Kostyliev after Natus Vincere secured their second win at StarSeries i-League Season 5, defeating Virtus.pro.

The Ukrainian-based team had a slow start to the event, losing in TYLOO in two maps, but are now on the verge of playoffs with wins over VG.Flash and Virtus.pro.

Na`Vi took a short break before the event, to recover from playing in Dallas

In a post-match interview, we asked s1mple about the early loss, Asian teams and playing Dust2.

Coming into the tournament you obviously have high expectations, you've been playing fairly well and there is not that tough of a competition here, but then you lose to TyLoo in the opening game. What happened there, how did you asses that match?

I think we lost because we didn't play in the three days before the tournament, we decided to take a break since some players were jetlagged after the ESL Pro League Finals. After we lost our first game, I mean, we didn't worry about it, you know? Sometimes it happens in the first game of the tournament, Cloud9 won the Major starting 0-2.

We just went to our room, talked about everything, talked about all of our maps. We are doing that every day after the games, and practicing, we are trying to get our form better in the tournament.

After that, you played against VG.Flash, you beat them, did you see any similarities between the two teams, both being Asian teams?

Yeah, they played the same on Mirage, we watched their demos. It's really weird to play against Asian team or teams from other regions because they have a different structure, they have different rotations and everything. We watched two or three demos and prepared.

You played Virtus.pro now and both maps were comfortable on the CT side, but in the last couple of rounds you kind of let them get back into it, they got the last couple of rounds. Was there a little bit of complacency at the end of the halves?

I don't think so, on Nuke we lost some rounds against force buys because of our communication, we just did good timeouts on Nuke and on Mirage, at the beginning we used two timeouts to decide how we are going to play against them with those guns. We felt comfortable playing against them, I mean, you never know what to expect when you are facing Virtus.pro, it's always random, but I believe that with MICHU, they should play two or three more LAN tournaments and they will bounce back with their great form.

Dust2 got reintroduced, for you personally, someone that is known for great fragging, does anything change when you come into a new map,one that has slightly different angles and stuff like that?

At the begging it's really hard, you are watching a lot of demos, a lot of games to see how players play. Before I was playing B, which is not the main AWP spot on this map, now I'm playing on the A site. It's always good to play Dust2 on scrims because you see what top AWP players do, how they peek, what angles they use. On this map, it's easier for me to find opening kills, entry frags. There are a lot of places where you can go and try to find them.

Overall you like the map, what are your impressions of Dust2?