karrigan: Confident going into BO3's

FaZe bounced back from their early loss to HellRaisers with wins against Immortals and Gambit and are currently 2-1 in the Swiss group system, needing only one more to qualify for the playoffs.

To hear about the team's devlopement and matches so far, we talked to the FaZe's in-game leader Finn "⁠karrigan⁠" Andersen.

You bootcamped before this event, how did that go, what did you prepare?

Since Katowice, our practice hasn't been that good I would say. We've been trying to figure out how to play all six maps, how to fit the players into the roles and it's quite hard always to do set strats if you are not sure how you want to play your standard. I think that the last three weeks, since Katowice, we used a lot of time to figure out how to play slower, so we have two different styles.

At Katowice we played very explosive, like a wolf pack, coming in, entry fragging and refraging all the time. Now we have focused more on playing the standard, how to play the XonX when we get into those kinds of situations. That's what we've been focused on in the bootcamp, ensuring we have two styles for the upcoming tournaments.

In the first match you played, you lost against HellRaisers what was a big upset. We saw them getting a lot of picks on the CT side, was that due to your new default coming in and not working or was there something else?

That is the problem when you use a lot of practices to train some kind of things and you forget how you want to play in a match. The main thing for me was that DeadFox had a good game, especially entry fragging, because I knew what he wanted to do at the beginning of the match and after that he was just everywhere but we were not able to punish that to a limit. And we never got to those XonX situations where our team can really excel. It was kind of a bad T side from us and that's what I changed today when we played against Gambit.

I just think that we were off to a bad start, looking how HellRaisers played G2 yesterday, I think they had a better game against us. It came down to us not being ready and not being set up for the match enough—it's always hard in the first game of the tournament and the first game of the day as well. It feels like we are slowly grinding it to the playstyle and the confidence we had at Katowice.

About the match you played against Gambit, you had a lead and were closing it out on CT, but you had three rounds in a row where it came down to a 1v1 that you clutched in the end, despite you having a 5v1 or a 4v1. What happened in those rounds, why did you let it get to those situations?

It was kinda hard to see how lost those because I haven't watched the VoD yet or the demo so I don't know if people overpeeked or Gambit just made some sick shots. It felt like every time they would be close to winning those rounds it would be them instantly killing three guys, it wasn't one by one by one.

Either we had some aim fails or they did some sick shots. Of course, losing so many players in a tight match meant that we had to double eco and it meant we were at a 12-12 scoreline. That was a big part of them coming back into the match. I feel that if we kept surviving with 3-4 guys we could've closed the match out earlier. It seemed that we knew they were going to do on the T side since they didn't win so many weapon rounds. I think they won only two on that T side.

Did you actually expect them to play Cache considering zeus "never plays" Cache. Did you expect the veto to come to this or some other map?

Since we got NiKo our Cache got a lot better, and knowing that one of their strongest maps, which is also one of our strongest maps, is Overpass I decided to instantly veto it out. I knew it was going to come down to Nuke, Mirage, Cache and Train. I think that are not strong maps for them at all. I was thinking it would be Nuke, but they were having a discussion about it for two minutes if they would ban Nuke, Inferno or Cache—they went with Nuke and we picked Cache, where we feel comfortable. And for me it they didn't look that good in the game on Cache, maybe that's just my view.

Taking all three maps together, you didn't have some brilliant results, do you think that opens it up a bit for you, lowering the expectations, considering for example G2 had stomps? What are your expectations for the rest of the tournament?

I think if you look at our matches against Immortals and Gambit today, if you just look at the result it doesn't look impressive, but if you look at it deeper it's different. We lost some stupid rounds, lost weapons where we have a big advantage and we lost clutches—we've lost more clutches than we won so far in the tournament—that are the main issues for us. I'm really confident going into the best-of-threes where we can loosen up and hopefully the team is as it was in Katowice. I don't think anyone underestimates us now, since we made the final in Katowice, but there are so many teams right now and whatever match we get in the quarterfinal or even the last game on Friday it is going to be hard, no matter what. Because there are four teams that have great players that are not going to make it into the playoffs.

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