loWel: We played as much as possible

In the interview the young Spaniard goes over the last few events the team played, their time in Colgone bootcamping, and shares some of his thoughts on the Swiss system, the map veto, and playing only one best-of-one match per day.

The action for MOUZ will start tomorrow at the ELEAGUE Studio in Atlanta, GA, as they face-off against HellRaisers at 23:30 .

Let’s start going back a bit. You guys have been struggling in the past couple events. You had a good showing in your ELEAGUE group stage and the ESL Pro League finals, but bombed out of groups in Oakland losing all best-of-ones and then lost to OpTic pretty bad in the ELEAGUE playoffs. What do you think went wrong? 

I think part of it was bad luck because we had to play OpTic right when they took off and won ELEAGUE. In Brazil we lost to Cloud9 and they won Pro League. Oakland was a bit worse. I think a lot of it is about streaks. Sometimes you get a good streak, other times a bad streak.

We started out playing well, then we played pretty poorly, and now we have to go back up again and get a good streak going. We need to become confident again. I think that’s what it’s all about. Look at OpTic, they were kind of streaky and now they just took off.

So you guys had that bit of a bad streak, but now you had a chance to bootcamp after ELEAGUE. How did that go? How did you guys prepare?

Well our goal was to prepare as many maps as we could as best we could. Especially the maps we’re going to play here. For instance against HellRaisers we know it’ll be something like Cache, Mirage, or something like that, but the preparation hasn’t been anything crazy. Just a normal bootcamp. We played as much as possible, tried to correct some small issues that made us misplay, etc.

Do you think the Swiss format is good for you?

Well in the Brazil group stages and at ELEAGUE we played the best-of-ones pretty well, so that’s good. But at the same time we broke down in Oakland and lost all our best-of-ones, but I do think it could definitely benefit us.

What about the first match against HellRaisers, what do you think about the draw? 

They’re a team you can’t underestimate. I beat them when I played with PENTA, and I think they’re a team we have to beat tomorrow. I mean they’re good, they have strong players like STYKO, etc., but we just have to win.

What do you think the key to mousesports playing like right when you joined is?

We need confidence. We need to win the first match. If we win that first match, we can win the second one. When chrisJ is hitting his shots, and NiKo is confident, and we’re all confident, that’s when things work. We’re a very emotional team, to be honest. When things don’t go so well we struggle a lot, but when things go well we’re really solid.

What do you think about the current meta? It looks like a lot of the top teams play really similar styles and it comes down a lot to individual plays, or taking early leads and holding economic advantages. People play a lot of maps pretty well. What are your thoughts on that?

Well I think at the highest levels everyone is really good, and the devil is in the details. But if one player can blow up he can also win a match. The game is still pretty tactical, plus teams know each other pretty well, but it still boils down to who makes the least mistakes.

How do you feel about the veto process? Three bans for the top seeded team and two bans plus picking side for the lower seeded team with the map being drawn randomly out of the last two.

Well the thing is with the way CS is right now you can’t really trust seedings. Teams that were down are now up, and vice versa. As far as having the last map being picked out at random between the last two, it’s okay. I mean it can make things a bit more exciting because you may have prepared one thing and then you have to figure something else out. Honestly, though, I don’t really care too much about it, it’s not particularly good or bad.

What about playing a single match a day?

I like that, because you need to be really focused, and if you lose a single match having the rest of the day to reset mentally is great.

But can’t it also happen that if you win a big match and get really hyped you can lose that feeling?

Yeah, that can happen too, but I’d rather be able to reset from a bad result. If you win, it’s easier to carry the momentum to the next day than it is to lose a big game and have to reset mentally right before playing another match.

If you play a bad match you have a whole day to go to the gym, relax, and hit the restart button. If you win it’s easy to go back in ready and focused even if it’s a day later.

Lastly, do you think there are any dark horses?

Not really, since it’s so stacked. It’s more like some teams that should go through are going to be left out.

Before we close it out, though, I’d like to give a shoutout to all the fans, and I want to thank them for their support and I hope they’ll cheer for us at the Major qualifier as it’s an incredibly important event.

To find out more about the next Major's final qualifier, head over to our preview, here. If you want to check out seedings and the first matches drawn, head over to the viewer's guide.