coldzera: "We practiced for two days with felps"

In their first match in Atlanta, SK survived a tough finish to their opening match against Space Soldiers on Mirage at the end of day one, winning 16-13.

coldzera addressed his performance in SK's match against Space Soldiers

After the match we quizzed Marcelo "⁠coldzera⁠" David about the difficult opener and his own performance in it. He also shed some light on just how much the Brazilians had practiced with João "⁠felps⁠" Vasconcellos and whether they're plugging him in Ricardo "⁠boltz⁠" Prass's positions:

We've heard that you haven't played with felps at all before you came here, is that true?

We practiced with felps just here at the Major, so we practiced for two days with him. But I think the team looked pretty good. Some strats are hard because we created new things and we tried to explain it to him here, it's hard, but it's okay, the team played well in the first match.

How are you using him, do you just plug him in boltz's positions or did you try to change things up for him?

It depends on the map, but he will probably play in boltz's positions, but today we had a talk after the match and maybe we should have put TACO on A and felps would be on mid with me, because we analyzed Space Soldiers and we saw XANTARES playing in window and connector all the time, so he switches and he cannot watch both.

So felps is the more aggressive player, he could have exploited this mistake about XANTARES, and TACO would be passive on A. But we didn't change because we practiced with TACO on mid, but it's okay, it worked.

It took you a long time to catch up individually against Space Soldiers, you had a rare off-game for the majority of the match, what happened? Considering you had played Space Soldiers at ESL One Cologne and lost to them, is there anything special that they do that throws you off?

I played really bad the first match (laughs), I need to focus more. I made a lot of mistakes in that game and a lot of unlucky plays, every time I died in a smoke, I died to someone jumping, I missed shots, but it's okay, the first match is always hard.

In general, Space Soldiers is a good team, they play really well, but I don't think they surprise us more than other teams. When we played them in Cologne, we had never played them before, so we didn't know how to play, we didn't know how to analyze them because they didn't play anything we could analyze. But at the Major we had a lot of games to watch and prepared better.

Could you go over the last three rounds, from the point where you lost the 4v2 at 14-12 and then decided to forcebuy instead of saving?

When we lost the 4v2, we checked the deaths and everyone died on the T side, so if we won the next forcebuy, we would break them and we should win the game. If we saved and lost the next round, we would have played the last round with a hard forcebuy, so for us it was better with a force, a save, and a force again.

Of course we now know we won the game, but I think it was the best way, we would have two buys and one save, but if we just saved, we would have had one buy and a forcebuy in the last round. It was the best solution at that moment.

Your next match will be against mousesports, what are your thoughts on the matchup?

mousesports is a good team, but we won everything in our last matches against them if I'm not mistaken. I don't think mousesports is a hard team to play against for us, we know really well how to play against them. It will be a good match, I think, everyone has a chance to win, but we are the favorites.

Something else we've already heard multiple times from SK was that you're mainly trying to attain Legends status, but is the goal perhaps for you personally higher?

Of course the goal is to win the Major (laughs), of course. But if we get the Legends spot and lose in the playoffs, it's fine. Our goal right now is to win WESG, for us that is the best tournament at the moment.