ANGE1: "Not counting on short term"

Kyrylo "⁠ANGE1⁠" Karasiow's team started the tournament with a loss to ENCE, but recovered after that to make the upper-bracket finals where they defeated GODSENT 2-0.

After HellRaisers secured a spot at the Offline Qualifier, we talked to ANGE1 about Bence "⁠DeadFox⁠" Böröcz, the loss to ENCE and motivation for the grand final.

Let’s go a little bit back - you’ve been in the HellRaisers roster for almost two years now, but lately you’ve been picking up - having more frags and having more of a star role. What changed from 2014, in ANGE1 and his role?

I think I’ve only now started to play CS not only for fun but work on myself and work on the team and think about any action I’m doing. So it gives me some frags I guess.

Talking about this tournament - what did you do in terms of preparation and what were your expectations coming in?

We worked a lot and we worked really good. We were not just running in the server for fun - we are working on rounds, we are talking and I hope it’s going to pay off. I’m not counting on short term breakout, we’re not even counting 100% that we will go to the Major. Our main goal is to build the team that will work, that will play really good for the whole next year.

Coming here, you had a rough start, you lost to ENCE what was probably the biggest upset so far even though it was a close match - what went wrong?

It’s not about what went wrong, it’s about what went well for suNny. First of all, he just raped us and as a first match of the tournament, it usually isn’t good for some teams. I don’t know why it happens, but it’s always the first game of tournaments… GODSENT lost their first match as well, and now we were in the finals. But I’m really glad that we found power and confidence to beat the really, really good team Heroic in a really close match and that we earned the spot in the final.

After the groups where you beat Heroic and then ENCE to go through you played Space Soldiers. On Nuke, a map they don’t play that much and you started on the T side and were dominating but you had troubles closing out on the CT side. So what happened there, why was it so hard for you?

It was really hard because of XANTARES to be honest. It was like, the guy who we are trying to avoid but it was really hard. I don’t want to say anything bad about the rest of the team, but half of our conversations during the match were how to deal with XANTARES and not to give him clutches and frags.

You closed it out in two maps in the end and you moved on to GODSENT. You had two close matches against them, what do you think the deal is - every match they had was pretty close, no one can close out maps against them and they had some problem closing them as well?

It was a really close match, it’s true, and it was all about the clutch. It felt like two pretty much same level teams playing, but to be honest, I didn’t feel like they played a lot by strats or combinations, they played too much by themselves, one by one, and I think that cost them the game.

You clutched it out in the end, and moving on, you already have the spot in the Major qualifier. Are you going to be motivated to play the final when you’ve already achieved your goal?

There’s a lot of motivation for tomorrow, first of all, it’s winning the first place, we need to win this tournament to have confidence for the next events. And there is $15,000 difference between second and first place. So I don’t think we will need to look for motivation somewhere else.

Regarding your pickup of DeadFox - now that you’re calling and communicating in English, you have a big pool of players you can pick from - how did you decide on him? How did you go through the scouting process?

First of all we were just watching stats from LAN from big events and looking for players that show bigger numbers than others. And then we contact the guy, talk to him, ask about like, does he want to play 24/7… I’m really happy that we picked DeadFox - he’s a perfect team player. For now, we are working more on our combination and strats so he doesn’t have a lot of space to get a lot of frags but I’m sure he’s gonna have it and show 100% of his firepower.

Professeur writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter.