After a convincing win over the Ninjas in Pyjamas propelled Team SoloMid into the ESL One: Cologne Quarterfinals, Peter "dupreeh" Rasmussen sat down with theScore eSports to discuss his team's preparations for the tournament, their group stage performance and their plans for Day 2.

As one of the favorites, how confident were you coming into the tournament?

We had some struggles before we got into the tournament, but when we play in these kinds of tournaments we always seem to focus a lot more than if we just sat at home and practiced. So, we were still confident coming into the tournament. People see us as a favorite, which is obviously a good thing, but we don’t really feel pressured in that sort of way. We just play our own game and work as a team.

We don’t really feel the pressure, but we do want to prove ourselves.

What kind of preparations did you guys do? And what was your primary focus during those preparations?

We boot camped for five days before we got here. We went through all the maps, we went through what mistakes we usually make, what we can do better and made new tactics. Obviously, we want to have new tricks for this tournament and surprise people.

The first couple days of the boot camp were really good; we improved a lot. But in the last couple of days… I don’t know why we struggled, but I think it was that usually we play at home for four-five hours a day, but this time we played maybe seven, eight or nine hours sometimes and it got to be a little too much. You couldn’t focus for very long, and then you started losing and everyone started being all “ugh” and didn’t want to play. You kinda lost the feeling of “hey, I want to play.” But the boot camp was good and it will prove to be good in the future.

You guys got caught out by the early game of Renegades, but finally settled down after losing the first five rounds. What did you guys see or find to help you adjust?

The first tactic that they pulled off on us in the pistol round was really good. We got totally caught offguard and I don’t even think we got a kill. We lost the first buy round as well and then you’re easily behind 5-0. But it felt like we only lost two important rounds, otherwise we had to save for bigger guns.

karrigan realized that they had some really good strategies, but if he played a little bit more aggressively, he could catch them offguard. If he could get the first few kills, their tactics just fell apart. The rest of the guys would just run through smokes trying to re-frag and it just didn’t work for them. Playing aggressive in the beginning was what got them.

You guys have had a strong Train in the past. What about the map do you think gives you an edge over your opponents?

We’ve lost one Train in our history of playing it, and that was online, so we haven’t lost it on LAN yet. I think that we have the right mindset. We have good ideas, tactics and we have a good idea of how to place each member.

I still think there’s some problems with Train. There’s so many chances of random things happening, like someone sneaks past you and you don’t even know. It’s really hard to cover everything, but maybe that’s how they want the map to be so it’s not as easy for the CT’s.

Your match against Ninjas in Pyjamas was a very one-sided game on Cache. Can you take us through why you think your team did so well against them?

We got off to a really good start and I think that was the key moment. We won the pistol round and didn’t lose any force-ups. We won the first buy round as well and we got into a really good lead; we had the economy completely on our side. We kept winning the right rounds. They had to save, or not buy the right guns and had a limited number of grenades as well.

We just won the duels. We kept winning our battles and when we were in the lead, we just had to make the right calls and rotate around. We just outplayed them in that way. One guy had to cover two or three angles at one point and that’s just when we hit them at the same time. We just played really well.

What was your goal for the major and how do you evaluate your first day?

We haven’t won a major yet, which has been the main goal for us. We’ve made it through to the semifinals twice and twice to the quarterfinals. I don’t think we’ve ever been knocked out during groups yet, which is really good. We’ve gotten over our choke, a long time ago when we won our first tournament. It was basically like cracking the nut and moving on from there.

We played very confidently. We had a little struggle in the beginning of the Renegades match as we got behind. In a Best of 1 if you get behind 5-0 really fast on an unfavorable side, it’s really hard, but against NiP it was a completely different game. Everyone communicated so well, everyone was playing their A-game; it was beautiful.

Now that you and Team EnVyUs have made it to the quarterfinals already, who would you like to play against in the quarterfinals?

Honestly, I really don’t care. We can beat everyone here, bring it on.

What are your plans for tomorrow?

Tonight we're going to relax like we always do. Celebrate that we got through. We're not going to be off tomorrow, we're going to work as we usually do. We are going to sit down and watch our opponents play and prepare for the upcoming game. When we know our opponent, we'll prepare even more.

Tomorrow is basically going to be a day of relaxing a bit obviously but we're still going to work [hard] in terms of making game plans for the next game, seeing what all the teams are doing, talk about what we're going to ban, there's lots of stuff to be done tomorrow.

This article was edited and condensed for clarity.