GruBy: "We feel we can make top one in Poland and get even higher in the ranking"

AGO took a 2-0 victory over eXtatus in the ESEA MDL Season 26 Europe grand final, which was held yesterday on LAN, leading up to the MDL Global Challenge. The Polish side will, therefore, be a participant in the seventh season of ESL Pro League, while eXtatus will still have a chance to earn a spot there through the online relegation matches.

GruBy feels that it's now harder to get a spot at the Main Qualifier than to get through the event itself

After their first game in New York, we talked to AGO's Dominik "⁠GruBy⁠" Swiderski, and with translation help from Mateusz "Sówek" Kowalczyk, learned about the Polish team and the 22-year-old player.

You just defeated eXtatus to win the European division of ESEA MDL, and more importantly secured a spot in the next season of ESL Pro League. How does it feel?

I'm really happy that we made it, we worked really hard. Now we get to play with the best teams in the world—it is great for our careers.

You guys created this team seemingly out of nowhere, and have now overtaken Kinguin and Pride as the second best Polish team. Do you think you can take the top spot from Virtus.pro?

Of course, yes. We are always heading for the top. It was a really long time and a lot of work to get to where we are right now. We feel like we are on fire right now, and that we can make not only top one in Poland, but get even higher in the HLTV rankings.

What was the process of creating this team? You yourself were largely inactive for the first half of 2017.

After I left AGG, I focused on streaming more. When I heard that Furlan would be kicked from Kinguin, I just thought we should make a team together. I was also keeping an eye on the Polish scene, and saw that TOAO, snatchie, and phr were really good. I immediately brought in TOAO and snatchie, and they told me to take phr as well because they played with him in iNETKOX. After that we found AGO, and everything was set.

Was anyone besides phr considered for that fifth spot on the team?

I thought about some other people, but I'd rather not say the names. But, right after a couple of practice games with phr, we decided to go with him. We didn't even practice with other players.

Speaking of AGG, I don't know how much you can say, but did you ever wind up getting paid by them?

Actually, they have started paying me, they have split the payment [into several parts], I heard that AGG found an investor so they are putting a lot of effort to pay the players they had not paid, to clear their name. I'm happy that it happened. I have not got my money from Vexed, though.

While you guys have been here, news just dropped about other changes happening in Poland with Kinguin adding fox and MUTiRiS, do you have any thoughts on that?

I really liked the previous roster and I think that the changes are changes for worse, I think that they needed other things than changing players. They were a good team and right now they might end up being worse and it can just collapse.

Back in 2015 you participated in two Majors with eBettle and Vexed. Now coming into 2018, what are you and your team going to do to make it back into a Major?

This is common knowledge right now between all of the tier 2 teams: the Minor is actually harder to get through than the Main Qualifier for the Major. We will do our best to win the next Minor, but it will just be really, really hard.

Obviously, you guys just qualified for Pro League, have you given any thought to how that is going to change things for you guys as a team?

Joining all the teams that are there, really good teams, will make us get a lot of experience through the whole regular phase of EPL. We are already practicing with those teams, we often play with them in practice matches, but I think that playing them in real games will improve us as a team because we will be less stressed and more comfortable playing with them online and—as well as on LAN.

Day one down, you have more work ahead of you. What do you think, in general, of the opposition you will face in the main competition of the MDL Global Challenge LAN?

The main reason we came here was to win the game versus eXtatus, it was really important to us to get to EPL. But of course, the MDL Global Challenge is really important for us as well. It's not important money wise or something, it's more important to prove everyone that we are good at offline tournaments and we really want to win it. We also prepared for it, our coach miNIr0x made a lot of analysis, he predicted that we would win against eXtatus so we have all of our group already analyzed.