mixwell: "Ska destroyed us on Cache"

After losing to Astralis in the opening match, OpTic were once again set on a collision course with Cloud9, the team that eliminated them with 2-0's at ESL Pro League and DreamHack Winter.

One of the team's AWPers, Oscar "⁠mixwell⁠" Cañellas, talked to us to let us know a bit about his troubles on Dust2, Peter "⁠stanislaw⁠" Jarguz's sniping and Tyler "⁠Skadoodle⁠" Latham on Cache.

Before this you just won ELEAGUE and you knew you were going to play Astralis again in the first match, how were you feeling coming in?

After winning ELEAGUE our confidence was really high and we know that we have a good matchup against Astralis, but we are not that good on Dust2, especially because I'm playing really bad with the AWP lately on that map, I need to figure out how to play better. It showed again today against Cloud9, I did a lot of mistakes and I played really bad.

In the Astralis match, did you expect it to go to Dust2 since it wasn't a map you played in the grand final at ELEAGUE?

Yeah, we expected to play Dust2 or Cache I believe. We know that Astralis have a really strong CT side and we lost that crucial pistol round, we played it really bad in a 3v2 with a guy with 10hp - because we knew he was 10hp. That tilted us a bit and we played really bad on T side.

Moving on to today, the infamous Cloud9 that you lost to pretty handily the last two times you met them on LAN. What were your feelings before that match?

The feeling was that we know that we can beat them because we beat them online, I don't know what happens when we go into a match on LAN against them. But we started very bad, we lost the first map because I played awful. Then we won Overpass where they played very strong, they won the pistol round and other crucial rounds. They did a 12-3 half, then we went to the CT side and we demolished them 13-0, they didn't get any rounds. But we played as a team, we played really well - doing setups on A, on B, and getting control of the game.

Then we went to Cache and we won pistol round, lost first gun round, they lost the next one but they forced and they broke our economy. They got the control of the first half, they won 10-5. We gone into the second half, we needed the pistol round. We won the important pistol round, grinded the game and ended up winning in overtime.

Let's talk about the AWPing situation, you said yourself - on Dust2 it wasn't going well for you. On the second map we saw stanislaw pick it up, a player we don't expect to see with the AWP. What is going on in that department?

stanislaw plays really good with the AWP, he's been using it in Rank S a lot. He knows what to do. I was playing bad, I said: I can rifle, I can do really well with the rifle and I believe in you guys so can get the AWP from me.

The last map, and Overpass were pretty close, it looked like you were going to lose, where did the, in a way, energy come to pull it out?

The energy came from the fact that we just want to win against them. We had a lot of really bad games against them and it hurts your honor, so losing a third time it would be really bad for us. 

And shoutout to Skadoodle as well, that was the most aggressive game that I've seen of him playing against us with the AWP and he destroyed us on Cache.

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