HObbit: Just wanted to finish the map [vs fnatic]

Gambit fell to CLG in their opening match at DreamHack Open Summer 2017, losing on Overpass in overtime. The CIS side proceeded to 2-0 and eliminate the other North American side at the tournament, Cloud9, picking up wins on both Train and Cache.

HObbit feels that Cache is a good map for them

After a tight series against fnatic that ended up as a 2-0 victory for the Swedes, Gambit finished the tournament in 5-6th place. To hear about all of that, we managed to talk to Abay "⁠HObbit⁠" Khassenov right after the game that eliminated his team from the event.

Your last event was DreamHack Austin, which you won, let's start with what you were doing since that event till now?

Everybody went on a vacation, I went to Thailand with my future wife... Everybody was relaxing. And then we came to a bootcamp about one week ago.

Here, your first match was against CLG, like back in Kiev at StarSeries. They surprised you last time, what was the mentality like going in this time?

They played really well, we respect them of course. Our mistake in the match here was that after we went 8-1 and the pause was called, our play was just broken. I don't know what happened, the morale went down and we just lost our game.

Moving on, you played against Cloud9. The first map was interesting, you made a comeback on Train, so tell me a bit about that match?

Actually, Cloud9 is always playing very well, but they are very comfortable to play against. I think we did the comeback because AdreN and the coach had some ideas, we did them and they worked. They said to play more aggressive, to go towards mid on A, spend utility there and stuff like that. On alley as well, I was playing very aggressively.

The second map was Cache, and you won that pretty comfortably. That's not a map you are known for, so tell me, why do you think that went so well?

We prepared our Cache for cs_summit and Austin and we came there and lost Cache to SK, there was no chance for us. But all that we prepared we did today, versus Cloud9. Actually, our Cache is good and today we deserved it.

Against fnatic, you ended up picking Train even though many would expect you to pick Overpass. Do you know what was the thinking behind that pick?

It's a hard question for me because all of these things are done by our coach and zeus. They came and told us that we are going to play these maps and that's it.

You lost the first map and then in the second you had a big lead on Inferno. How didn't you close it out? What was the problem?

Actually, two of our players wanted to go to the restroom earlier and we just wanted to finish the map, we were just like "go push", "go faster". And then the score was 14-11, we took the pause because it was a dangerous situation for us, they went to the restroom, but after that, we just couldn't do anything.

mou has been playing well, on that map on Inferno I think he had 40 kills, is there anything that changed regarding him recently?

mou really played very well, he had the important frags, in the important moments he did very well, but it's always the team that is winning, not a player. Probably the whole team did mistakes and that's why we lost. But big respect for mou, he was really the MVP.