With a 16-10 win against Rise Nation and a marathon of an Inferno against Natus Vincere, which went to five overtimes before a winner was found, Gambit secured the first spot in the semi-finals.

HObbit admitted there was additional pressure on Gambit due to their history with Natus Vincere

We got a hold of Abay "⁠Hobbit⁠" Khasenov after the match that sent them to semi-finals at DreamHack Open Winter to talk about the event and Gambit's journey so far.

You've already mentioned that your preparation was lacking before this event, can you first of all get into that, why the preparation wasn't there?

It was because we played a lot of hours before IEM Oakland. We just understand one thing - we need to work on our mental problems. That's it. And the relax just helped us a lot, because it removed the pressure we had about the game.

Going into the matches here, you were in control the entire match against Rise Nation, but it got a bit unexpectedly close, was there something that perhaps surprised you about them?

Yes, of course, firstly they played really well. Secondly, our preparation, we didn't play CS:GO, and of course we need some hours to understand how to do some things. We didn't feel our game until like 10 rounds in. And after, we just found our game and we won it.

Did you just need to warm up, then?

Yeah, something like that, we needed to warm up. We didn't do that, because we just arrived yesterday at like 3 AM and we slept for about six hours. That's our mistake, of course.

Let's get into the quintuple-overtime match against Na`Vi, you did a bit of a comeback towards the end of regulation and there were some crazy rounds, can you talk me through it?

That was 100% an historic match for CIS at least, and very, very important for us, for our team, for our fans. Of course, for some of people, we didn't play how we can play because of some pressure. All of us understood that it was a very important match and we were just scared to do some things because of that. The more important thing was that we just won it.

I was in stress, to be honest. This game was very important, more important than some grand finals for me, because I wanted to understand if we were good because of Zeus or not.

Like you said, it took you a bit of time to get into the matches, do you feel like you're going to improve as the tournament progresses?

Of course, 100% we're going to improve our game. Now we're feeling some power and we're going to use it.