B1ad3: "We decided to drop all small leagues to focus fully on preparation"

FlipSid3 were a tough team to gauge ahead of the Romanian event due to their long hiatus from offline competitions, which saw them play only one offline match since the ELEAGUE Major, at Adrenaline Cyber League earlier this month.

Andrey "⁠B1ad3⁠" Gorodenskiy's team have, however, won their first match in Bucharest, in which they pulled off a comeback from a 4-12 deficit on Train versus Renegades after overtime.

B1ad3 shared that other teams attempted to poach some of his players after the ELEAGUE Major

Our last interview of day one features the Ukrainian in-game leader, who shed some light on FlipSid3's hiatus after the Major, their preparation, and their first Train match.

I'd like to start with your last five months, as in that time you only played two maps offline, which was very recently at the Adrenaline Cyber League, what have you been up to since the ELEAGUE Major aside from online qualifiers?

Well, after the Major, there were some qualifiers. We were a little bit disappointed and not so motivated, and it was also a period during which our contracts were about to expire. There were a few attempts from other teams to poach our players, so we were in a waiting moment before signing new contracts and starting with confidence and belief that everything was fine.

Before that, we lost a lot of online matches and some events, and only before DreamHack Tours we were really focused and tried to win, but at the same time we weren't prepared. We decided to drop all small leagues to focus fully on practice and preparation, we made a lot of new stuff and practiced really hard. At the moment, we are really prepared on certain maps and we showed good results in practice.

You've mentioned being well prepared on some maps, what was the confidence and morale like before you travelled to Romania?

Actually, we expected ourselves to have a really bad start, because we didn't play LANs. Adrenaline was really terrible in terms of conditions for players during the match, it was really loud, there were no booths and the headphones didn't cancel much noise. The crowd was too loud and we couldn't communicate properly because of that. So, I can't even count this as a LAN experience for us.

At the same time, we knew that this studio would be quiet and we could just focus on communication with no distractions. We knew it would have really good conditions. We told each other to realize that it's all in our hands and that we just need to play properly, but at the end we still had a lot of shaky moments in the first match.

If we play like we played in practice, I think we can qualify, we just need to find our game, the game we showed in practice. We just need to play our game and stop doing the stupid mistakes.

Talking about your first match, in the end you had to come back from a substantial deficit, can you walk me through your point of view of the Renegades match and how you clawed back?

Well, the score could have been 11-4 on the T side for us if we didn't lose some stupid rounds. We started pretty well, even though we lost the pistol, we just said "okay, forget about it". We had a plan how to play the forcebuy and the round after that, and it worked really well.

The only thing that ruined everything were advantageous situations that we lost, we have a gameplan and then something distracts us mentally, and we can't focus on the next rounds. So we were trying to do some slow rounds just to chill, not to go for fast peeks, so that we don't tilt and go YOLO. We know that in tilt situations we don't communicate properly and make mistakes, so we tried not to do anything fast in the first rounds. About the comeback, well, it looked like a comeback, but when we scored 15-15, we were on the proper path. We didn't feel like we weren't losing the match, because we were winning everything, so at 15-15 we were very confident we could win the match.

I noticed that you did try a few faster strats, as opposed to your usual slow pace, is this something that you were conscious about ahead of the event and in practice, that you needed to switch things up from time to time?

Well, we have like three tempos - slow rounds, a middle ground with some fast peeks, and also we have fast rounds on every map. In the first part of the first half, it was pretty successful, and in the last three rounds we started to do really stupid things, more like our tilt mode. Someone died and someone else said "let's peek this immediately", we didn't make proper decisions, they were tilt decisions. Mostly, we're trying to combine tempos, but in this match, we were rushing last rounds because it was tilt-mode.

Even five months ago, we had a lot of five strats, at least two on each map. Maybe one year ago, when our team was less experienced, we were playing really slow. And from that period, people still think that we play really slow, but I don't think it is true, because we mostly play mid-rounds. And as other teams, we have fake rounds that are prepared specifically the last seconds of the round, because at the end of the round, some players panic and start to make mistakes.

Looking ahead, as we're waiting for the draw to come out at this point, do you have any preference as to who you'd like to meet or avoid?

I didn't think about the match-ups, it all depends on maps, I think… But without thinking about a veto, I think we'd like to skip the big names, it would be much easier for us to get into our comfort zone. We'd like to skip G2, they're a pretty aggressive team, and maybe HellRaisers, because they have good teamplay and good structure, they're one of the favorites here. And maybe mousesports.