device: "It was finally our turn"

Astralis took down Ninjas in Pyjamas in an exciting three-map series, with Overpass once being the decider in Atlanta.

As the dust settled, we talked to Nicolai "⁠device⁠" Reedtz to find out his thoughts about the match, closing out Overpass and the errors on Cobblestone.

Playing against NiP, the history is there: you haven't won against them in the last year, at least offline - how were you feeling coming into the match?

Since we brought in gla1ve, we felt like that a lot of the bad maps we had in the matchup against NiP were turned around as good maps, so we weren't thinking about the old results, choke…

It's kinda hard against them, it's 14 months since the last time we won, at ESL Dubai. Obviously it is in the back of the head, but as you could see in the match, it didn't affect us too much.

You played IEM Oakland with gla1ve where you had a good group stage, but dropped out in the semi-finals kinda disappointingly. So how were your feelings coming here after that?

We didn't have that much practice, we played all days when we were home and we went like 10-0 in ECS, didn't lose a single map so we were pretty confident obviously. Oakland wasn't that much of a tough loss for us. There were so many other things that affected us, we had three days off, we weren't able to practice because there were no teams practicing, so we just did deathmatch and stuff. Thats obviously not so nice but there is nothing you can do about it. I had an off game at IEM but we feel pretty confident moving into the semi-final here, I'd say we have a pretty strong map pool against SK.

Let's start with the first map, Cobblestone. You were in the lead the whole time but you let it slip in the last moment. What happened there?

We haven't really practiced Cobble much, but we had good results on it, so we lack a lot of experience I'd say. We should've probably have won that if we didn't lose the three anti eco's and lose a lot of silly rounds. I did a misplay at 14-14 I think when friberg got my AWP and got a triple kill, which I would say lost us the map in all honesty. It did show us that how we are playing, with the confidence we have in the team that we can play maps that we are not even that comfortable on and play them against probably the best team in the world on that map. And we should've won.

Then you move on to Train which seems like a very good map for you and you just stomped NiP on it, how do you think you stand on the map?

We have a good streak on Train at the moment, we only lost to SK on it where we also had a lead. Train is one of our strongest maps and it was pretty strange for us that we picked Train and NiP chose to start T. That means that we got CT side on all three maps in the BO3 and we are satisfied how we played Train. We played it as usual.

It came down to Overpass as the first quarter-final, and also went down to the wire. You guys managed to close it out in the end with some crazy rounds and crazy clutches, how did it feel to finally get that off your chest in a way?

I didn't have the best map for me personally, I've got a lot of opening with the AWP in the start but I didn't usually get into the normal game on Overpass - that's usually my strongest map. We won because we believed in the philosophy we have on the T side, our T side is usually very strong. We don't make silly mistakes and it makes us kinda hard to beat when we execute. And there is also the little things, small clutches when you win a close game like this. It could've gone either way in all honesty, but after 14 months it was finally our turn.

In the semi-finals you will be playing SK as you said, the rematch from IEM Oakland. FalleN said today that they are unbeatable on Train at the moment. Will we see a rematch of that and what are your thoughts going into it?

I feel it's absolutely up to them to pick it if they want to play it. We have a really strong veto I would say so we'll see what their map choice is and if we get to challenge them.

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