koosta: Not hard to prepare for UYA

CLG put up a strong fight against the world's number one team Astralis in their opening match of StarSeries Season 3, but weren't able to close it out despite a strong lead. The North American squad got their first victory on day two, beating the Chinese squad UYA 16-3.

koosta feels that FNS's structure helped his AWPing

Following their day two match, we talked to Kenneth "⁠koosta⁠" Suen who shared his thoughts on the matches so far, team chemistry and the hardships of AWPing. 

You had a good start to the match against Astralis, you had a strong lead, 6-0, but in the end they managed to turn it around. What went wrong for you there and what were the breaking points for them to win that map?

We definitely started really strong, and I know that me personally, I didn't expect we'd come out with that many rounds that early. The one round that really let them come back into the game is when Xyp9x won a 1v2 against us on B. That broke our money, we had to double-eco and they came back to 6-6. We won the round to make it 7-6 and closed the half 9-6. We put ourself in a position to have a really strong half, but slight mental errors let them come back into the game.

They had a 2v3 clutch on B around 10-11 and closed it out after, what do you remember from the T side?

A lot of our issues during the map were the smallest errors, for example when nahtE got stuck on a wall trying to watch our flank, and they are so good that they can really capitalize on those rounds . We got punished for the smallest things.

After that, you were drawn against UYA. How much did you know about them, did you prepare and what were your expectations?

I didn't prepare personally, but our coach did, ImAPet, he watched a few demos. We got our map that we wanted, which was Cobblestone. I asked our coach a few questions and he told us what pistols they do and that didn't really change, and he told us about solo plays the guy on A does. Someone on twitter asked me if it was hard to prepare for them, I would say that's a no, they didn't really change too much and we were ready for it.

A lot of people bigged up their individual play and skill. Did you feel that in the game at all?

There were some rounds where they took B and they killed all of our B players really fast. But you can't really rely on that to win you rounds. I think the fact that our teamwork was better than theirs let us take a lead and hold on it.

koosta shaking hands with Astralis after getting 27 kills versus the Danes

Talking about you personally, you are back on the AWP but sometimes you still play with a rifle. What's the AWP dynamic inside the team?

Usually I'll buy the first map, and I told rickeh that he wants to AWP just to buy one. Sometimes I die and he has his AWP saved and I just let him save it and I pick up a rifle. It's not really that complicated.

Last year there was a period when it was talked about you not wanting the AWP anymore, with reltuC and hazed picking up the AWP in CLG. What changed from that time, from then to now, why did you go back?

I definitely had a lot of confidence issues back then and I thought that it would be good if I could just take a step back, play a simpler role and redevelop myself as a player. Once I started doing that, I got my confidence back and I knew the team had confidence in me so I asked culter and told im I want to AWP again.

From your point of view, do you feel that all of those drops in form hit AWPers a lot harder?

I would say so, because you have to hit the shots that you get the chances to hit. If you don't hit the easy shots or shots in general it can really take a toll on you and it's sometimes hard to ignore and keep it out of your head.

Can you compare FNS to other in-game leaders to leaders of other teams you've been in in the past year or two? What is different now, what does he excel at?

The biggest thing I like about FNS is that he really works hard to keep us on the same page. He introduced a lot of structure, I know what my teammates are doing and what they will be watching and things like that. That really allows me to trust how I play and go aggressive, compared to before and Liquid where we didn't really have this level of structure. It was a lot more loose and I think that's a harder environment to AWP. We didn't have that much chemistry because we changed players a lot and introducing structure kinda forces you to have chemistry, it helps you build it.

What are you feeling going forward, is there any pressure on you to perform, to get results?

I know going into the tournament I didn't have any pressure to do anything at all, for me personally. As long as I'm satisfied and think I played well, if we lose, then we lose. Everyone in the team knows what they need to do, if we play like that...I think that you saw from the Astralis game that we can get some nice wins in. I think the Astralis game gave us confidence that we can play at that level and compete.

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