STYKO: Pracced Tricked a lot lately

In their first match at DreamHack Open Tours, HellRaisers had little trouble defeating Envy on Cache, finishing the match with a dominant 16-5 scoreline.

We caught up with Martin "⁠STYKO⁠" Styk to talk about HR's disappointing showing in Austin last week, his own goals for Tours, and their upcoming winners' match against Tricked.

Given how well you did at StarSeries, you had a disappointing showing at DreamHack Open Austin, what went wrong there?

We didn't feel really comfortable individually at the tournament, especially not me, and from what I heard from my teammates, they didn't feel comfortable as well. We just couldn't hit our shots, I don't know why it was, all five of us were in some kind of a slump.

I hope we overcame that after this win, I just felt even in practice from home that we couldn't hit our shots for like two straight weeks, we couldn't win anything important and we lost a lot of matches in EPL, and it cost us Austin as well.

Did you have any time at all to practice before Tours with how close it was to Austin?

We were really close to missing our only practice day before this tournament because of the delayed flights from America, especially Zero had some troubles, but he figured it out. We had one pracc day, we kind of ran all of our maps once and we just tried to see what's wrong and what we could improve. We tried to improve our pistol rounds, because we were terrible at them statistically at the last tournaments, and that's basically it, just one day and we started traveling to Tours.

Ever since you took a break from school, you said yourself you've been feeling better individually, and now you had a really good performance against EnVyUs as well, can you point out anything specific that you changed, got better at?

The thing I got better at, I kind of try to understand the game more, from like an in-game leading point of view, even though I don't in-game lead that much, I just call some ideas for ANGE1 and he agrees or disagrees. I just try to see the game in the macro perspective, not my individual micro game, but to help ANGE1 to somehow improve our T sides, CT sides… Maybe that's why I didn't play that well lately, because I focused more on watching demos and I didn't try to watch a certain player, I watched the whole team, what they do. That's probably why I lacked some confidence in Austin especially and also online matches. This game was good, so I hope it's going better.

Up next for you guys are Tricked, who upset G2 earlier, how much do you know about them and what do you expect from the match-up?

We pracced them quite a lot lately, I remember their praccs, we played them on a couple of different maps. We didn't expect to meet them for sure, obviously they were the underdog against G2 and they will be slight underdogs against us as well. Our map pool is somewhat similar, it will be like a battle of the gun fights I guess, who wins the pistol rounds and so on. I'm really looking forward to this best-of-one, so let's see what we can do.

After placing 3rd-4th at StarSeries and disappointing to get out of groups in Austin, what goals did you set for yourselves here?

I would say finals. That's like the goal for me personally, we didn't discuss our goals within the team, but for me personally, the finals would be an achievement. I would be satisfied if we showed a good performance after groups, even if we lose in semi-finals but it's a close match then I'll be satisfied as well, because we can prove that we are a really good team.

There's much better opposition here than in Austin in my opinion, we have some trouble playing against Na`Vi, mousesports, etc. Once we reach the playoffs we will be underdogs, I feel like.