YNk: ''We’re just in much better shape right now than them... I think Liquid in the next tournament would be stronger than here''

BLAST never looked in doubt for FaZe with three BO3 sweeps to finish top of their group. Following their second victory of the weekend against Liquid, YNk spoke with GGRecon

We’re here with the coach of the team that just came out on top on the first weekend of the Blast Premier series. YNk you guys beat Liquid for a second time in a row. Best of 3s all the way, different maps as well. There’s no excuses this time, there is no one doubting it, FaZe is probably back on top. What do you have to say?

I mean, it’s still early days for us. It’s the first tournament of this year, but we’re super happy that we performed really well. That some of the things we were working on in the practice we managed to translate to the official game as well. And yeah, obviously a great result for us. We were able to secure the high seed for the Spring Finals. Just going back to work now and starting the preparation for Katowice.

Honestly, when we saw broky on the server today, you could have taken his name tag off, and I would have thought it’s Guardian from two years ago. How have you managed to bring him up to a point where he’s AWPing with the best of them?

I think that is all up to him. To be honest, we made this switch after we qualified for Katowice, and he got more responsibility with that, and he’s been working harder and practicing. He hasn’t had that big of a role with the AWP before in his earlier teams, mostly the secondary AWPer on the CT side, so I think today was his best performance yet with the AWP and I’m happy for him that he’s done really well. We’re proud of him and we’re going to keep working with him and he’s going to grow with every tournament with every day and just keep getting better.

Now, I don’t think anyone’s doubting the efficacy of the change, but what really prompted it behind the scenes in the team, because so far it’s doing wonders but you’ve got to ask why hasn’t it happened yet?

I think it’s just the fact that, that was the goal for us for 2019 with this roster just to figure out how we set up the roles at the start was optimal, and after some of the losses we looked at it again at what we were missing, and we thought it would be a good change to put olof back on being the anchor on the T side, sort of a lurker because he’s an extremely experienced player. He’s been in those situations a million times and he can create a bit more space for us, and broky’s mechanics are really strong so he has no issues playing with the AWP and I think so far it has been working good for us.

Here’s the thing though, you guys have this incredibly good matchup versus team Liquid, where Liquid of course relies on their individually skilled players, while you have some of the more skilled players in the world. Do you think they were facing a bigger disadvantage because of this new X Factor with the AWP because of the fact that you guys now have theoretically a dedicated AWPer?

I think maybe to an extent because they didn’t really know what we’ve switched and if we’ve switched something. I think we’re just in much better shape right now than them, and we worked on our flaws a lot during the break. We started practicing really early. We had two boot camps so I think Liquid in the next tournament would be stronger than here, but we’re at the point where we’re just focusing only on ourselves and want to get more games like this under our belt where we’re playing some of the best teams in the world and see how we match up against them. 

Well, I mean it was going very well so far. But the other question that has to be asked is also that if your match-up is incredibly good versus Liquid, are you guys a little bit worried when you’re looking at other top teams that might perhaps be better at historically being able to deal with star players and of course I’m talking about Astralis over here, no one else.

Well, not really. It’s a different team right, so you’re gonna approach a game a little bit differently. We had some very good games against Astralis and some very terrible games against Astralis. It comes down to that you’re not allowed to make a lot of mistakes against them because they are such a strong team - their minimal level is super strong as well. So, each mistake you make they are going to punish you for that. So, if you managed to play a solid game, you can have a good chance of beating them with our players. So that’s what we are going to be focusing on just in general, kinda to clean up our game and make as few mistakes as possible in games. 

Are you guys bootcamping going into Katowice now? 

Yeah, we are trying to organize something for that as well, at least for a couple of days. Until then, we’d just be playing online. But hopefully we will sort something out before Katowice as well. 

Last question very quickly. You guys were winning a lot of these 1vX scenarios to a point where it seemed a little bit extreme and of course that is not going to be happening every single game to which the question has to be asked: Your mid rounds could be interpreted as having some weakness in them over there. Do you think it’s fair to say that is something you guys need to work on a little bit before moving on?

I think we still need to work on a lot of things. But, you look at any game that’s being played, there’s always going to be clutches when it comes to best players and best teams in the world. You can count on cold winning a clutch. It’s not like oh he won that round, he wins those. Same with team Liquid players. Stewie, the 1v2 pistols he won to start Dust II with I think 10 HP, that shouldn’t be a round and he should win. But those things happen and you need to grind it out. I think for sure we look back and see what we could do better and work on our flaws. But, I think in general, today we played much better Dust II than we did the first time around and I think it showed in the score as well.

Alright you guys heard it here first. Cold is gonna keep clutching, olof’s gonna keep clutching. I think we all knew that already. YNk, thank you so much and again congratulations on the first seat.

Thank you!

 

Image via BLAST.