LoWkii: "We didn't want salaries or financial help"

AGO handed Limitless a tough loss on Mirage to start off group D, but the French side, that was considered one of the underdogs of the tournament, managed to turn it around, picking up wins over Fragsters, RESISTANCE, and finally, fnatic.

LoWkii thinks that Maka has a future in one of the top French teams, such as G2 and EnVyUs

After the team won their crucial match, barely closing out the game after a big first-half lead, we sat down with Théo "⁠LoWkii⁠" Téchené​ who told us about the inception of the team, their preparation and the matches in Barcelona.

This team, Limitless, had almost no results before this, when did you come together, can you tell me a bit about the team?

The team is pretty new, we have been playing together for about a month. It's two players from Epsilon, Kan4 and me, and a former player of dizLown, that won Assembly Winter. We are all friends and we played with this same team in the past. But right now, in September, we decided to play together again and try a new project, with new possibilities in game, because I lead, and I've also picked up a new sniper Maka so we have two snipers and maybe two leaders... It's pretty cool.

You got together, you started practicing, do you have an organizational backing, pay, is it a full-time thing?

The first week when we played together we won a French championship on the internet, that was called Underdogs. We beat ARES and aAa, so it was a pretty decent performance. After that, we directly played the WESG qualifier without any practice, we just won and qualified for Barcelona. After that, we started the practice.

Limitless is an organization which is lead by friend of mine, and at the beginning, we didn't want salaries or financial help, because in the past, in Epsilon, the French lineup, we had some money to play and it doesn't work. The reason is that players think that it's all done, you have money so they can do whatever, they lose motivation. At the start of this team, me and the owner of Limitless agreed to not have salaries and that we should try and prove in the next 3-4 months that we have what it needs to be professional. I think that after this performance we probably have proven that.

Seeing the groups here, what were your first thought about the four teams?

We had a pretty decent group, when we saw it we were pretty happy. You have fnatic, and you have AGO and Fragsters, but we know what we are capable of. We prepared the LAN for a week in Paris on a bootcamp at the Paris Gaming School and we focused on the preparation of the four matches, in particularly of AGO and Fragsters, because they are the two teams close to our level, if you can say that.

The first match, versus AGO, didn't work out because we focused on anti-strats and it's not a good way. We were completely blocked on "they are going to do this", "they are going to do this" and we don't play our game anymore. So at the next matches we decided to stop thinking only about anti-strating, just know the important, global things, and after that focus on our proper game and the three other maps, which were RESISTANCE, Fragsters and fnatic. It was three times Cache, and three wins.

Is Cache your best map, is that something you feel extremely comfortable playing, or did it just turn out like that at this event?

It's not our best map, we have two other maps with very good results, but for this event, we prepared Cache because we knew that all the teams in the group leave this map in the veto almost every time. So we really focused on this map and all of our players are very confident on this map. So we decided to pick this map on all the BO1's and it worked.

Limitless were ecstatic after their win over fnatic

Let's touch on the last map, against fnatic you went up 11-2, but then they slowly started coming back. Tell me about the struggle to close it out, it's always hard against a big team.

We won the second pistol round, we were 12-4 and after that we didn't want to control the map, we just wanted to use out strat, our best strat, and it's not the solution versus good players like fnatic. You cannot pull out your strat at the beginning of the round. You need to control the map, you need to show your presence on all of the map, and then you can use your strat.

So we lost like five rounds because of that, after that, Maka helped me to calm down the team and to go and take map control, where we are really strong because of our work on the map. We did that, we won one or two cutches and then the magic happened.

You mentioned Maka a few times, as far as I know he is a pretty new player, this is his first international tournament, where has he come from, he has been pretty strong?

Exactly, this is first international tournament. He is one of the best players that I've ever seen in CS, this guy is playing CS for a maybe one or two years. He is just genius, he knows all of the positions, he can read the game, he can take the AWP, he can take the lead with me, he is really strong on the pistol, he has really good reads on the strats of our adversaries. We are just totally crazy about this guy, he is a really promising talent from France and I'm sure about his progression for the next year, I'm pretty sure he will go to G2 or EnVyUs soon.

Any last thoughts, on moving on in the tournament and things to come after the tournament?

After this tournament, some of the guys on the team have school so we are trying pass our exams and after that we normally have the final of ESL in France, the national championship in December and after that we are going to practice, practice to prepare for China because we qualified. And we are going to try to do our best in the playoffs tomorrow.