dupreeh: "More than satisfied"

Topping their group, Astralis faced SK in today's first semi-final of IEM Oakland, where the Brazilians won two very close maps, Train and Mirage.

We talked to Peter "⁠dupreeh⁠" Rasmussen to find out what his thoughts on the semi-final were, what Lukas "⁠gla1ve⁠" Rossander has changed in the team and what the team can take away from their last two events with the new in-game leader:

In the semi-final against SK, they decided to leave in Cache which they never play, why did you go for Mirage instead?

I'm not in charge of the veto, so I don't know that much, but we talked about it yesterday. I think it's mainly because SK had a shaky Nuke lately, they lost pretty hard to G2 and TACO said they had to fix Nuke, so they probably didn't feel confident on it. We had an okay showing against G2 even though we didn't win, so I think they mainly did it because they feel uncomfortable on it themselves, not because they feared us on it. We decided to pick Mirage because we weren't comfortable playing Cache, we hadn't put much time into it. So we wanted to play a map that we knew we put a lot of time into already.

Would you have picked Nuke if that was in the pool instead of Cache?

Yes, we would.

Train was down to the wire really, and it came down to a pretty big comeback from SK on the CT side. How much did you think you'd be able to do on the T side beforehand?

I'm pretty confident in saying SK is the best team in the world on Train, they have a huge record in beating the best teams in the world. We've had a pretty big success on Train as well and I think in the end we are probably the second best team on it right now, everyone is so confident on it and we have a lot of ideas. We got behind like 0-5 in the beginning and we started figuring them out. As Terrorists we knew exactly what to do against them, we knew what type of strategies to use, but in the end they just adapted to us and we couldn't close it out, but I still believe we can become better on it than them.

On Mirage, like you said one of your comfortable maps, it was looking good at about 12-13 when you came back from a deficit. You managed to make a game out of it but dropped the ball in the end, did they adapt to your defence again?

It's kinda funny, because on Mirage we made a lot of changes to the roles, especially myself, I'm playing new roles on both T and CT, I'm in the B apartments now. I had a really bad T half, mainly because the thing is that if the guys don't get anything from the default on middle, I don't really have much to do as a lurker in B apps, I'm just standing around waiting for everyone to get killed. So I didn't have much impact as Terrorists, and obviously I hate not having any impact as an entry fragger and a lurker.

It came down to that we didn't have that much success doing the defaults in the beginning. I think we had like a 4-4, and then we just went a little bit away from what we wanted to do, making specific fakes rather than trying to bruteforce ourselves through it. They adapted as well, pushing us as CT, they made a lot of information plays at the right times and they knew where we were going. Generally they played very aggressive in middle to kill our momentum and the default before we could do anything.

So, the funny thing as CT is that we struggled more on the B bombsite in practice, and this time it felt like we played way better than we usually do there. That's why they went there that much, we played against them quite a few times on Mirage and they had so much success on the B bombsite against me and Xyp9x. We played pretty well there now and in the end they made really good splits on A and they're insanely good at that, so they just figured us out I guess, as they did on Train. That's why they won I guess.

So far you made playoffs at ELEAGUE and top four here, first of all, are you satisfied with what you've done since the addition of gla1ve and secondly, what can you take away from the past couple of weeks?

Oh yeah, definitely. I'm more than satisfied. Obviously I would've liked to make the final and I feel like we could've done it as well, we should've won Train and we could've won Mirage too, but they won the right rounds, in general they're a more strategical and better team than we are right now. That's just it, we've changed so much since we removed karrigan, gla1ve came in with a completely new playstyle and so many of us got new roles. So I'm satisfied with what we've achieved so far, and the mental state, which has been a problem for us for a long time. People were playing pretty well individually, everyone had good rounds, so I think we did pretty well considering how much time we had to prepare, because we only had a bootcamp and about a week of practice, then we went to ELEAGUE and been on the road ever since. I'm looking forward to the future, we're just gonna have to change a few things here and there, add a few strategies, and I'm pretty sure we're gonna win something pretty soon.