After a difficult day that saw them lose consecutive games to Splyce and Samsung Galaxy, Royal Never Give Up managed to advance to the quarterfinals as Group D's second seed by winning a single game against Team SoloMid. Following the day's matches, jungler Liu "Mlxg" Shiyu sat down with theScore esports to discuss this week's pressure, blue side, Aurelion Sol, and their hopes for the rest of the tournament.

Congratulations on qualifying for the quarterfinals. You had a very rough first two games. How did you guys manage to focus and keep it together to win the third game?

Last week, we won two games out of all of our games and this week TSM hadn't been doing so well in their games either so we realized that it really just came down to the last fight between us and TSM. Since we had already gotten a win against TSM last week, we weren't really that nervous about it.

In this tournament, and in the LPL, it has felt like blue side has been very important and had a very high win rate. You knew that you would only have one blue side game. How did that affect you?

In terms of blue side and red side, we didn't feel that pressured. But what did make us feel pressured is that we haven't been doing that well when we've been just scrimming with other teams. Our team members were not mentally there or prepared for it.

I also noticed in the first game against TSM that you had a lot of success with Mata roaming with you, but after that game you went back to focusing on playing laning supports. Why did you guys decide to stick to that method?

The reason we decided to change our strategy is that we noticed a lot of teams are playing really strong bottom lanes, so they can have a lot of advantage in the lane. Especially with teams on the blue side, their jungler is always camping bot, so they can always come and invade red side. So we decided to pick a very strong support so we can always push our lanes out.

You also managed to play Aurelion Sol today after the remake last week. Was it something you were saving for TSM? I noticed you banned it first in at least one game today.

The reason we only picked Aurelion Sol today is because he was disabled last week, so we didn't really practice him then. During the week off, when we had time, we started practicing him more and thought we'd just pick him in a game where he isn't banned.

Against TSM, especially last week, you guys went about targeting Svenskeren, especially in his jungle. Was his pathing something that you researched ahead of time?

We weren't particularly focusing on Svenskeren. We saw that our bot lane had an advantage, so I wanted to help bot lane a bit more and invade their jungle, and it just so happened that we caught Svenskeren always around.

Some have been critical of the LPL teams' inconsistent performances, saying that EDG's performance in particular yesterday was unexpectedly shaky. Did you expect them to have such a difficult group stage?

We didn't expect EDG to have such a rough group stage. EDG is a super strong team, and especially in scrims against all the teams, they've absolutely shown dominance, so to us it was a real surprise. We thought they were just going to breeze through group stage.

Do you have any predictions for how you will perform in quarterfinals or a particular team you want to face?

The team we want to face most is H2K. In terms of our goal for Worlds, our initial goal was just to make it out of the group stage. Now that we have, we don't want to dream too big, but we just want to make sure we play the rest of our games really well and play the best that we can.

Kelsey Moser is a staff writer for theScore esports. You can follow her on Twitter.