AdreN: "Our aggressive style against SK's is going to be some beautiful CS"

Gambit are now sitting at 2-1 in the Swiss group stage following a win over Space Soldiers earlier today after a near-perfect CT side on Train, even though it took them most of the second half to finish things off at 16-13.

AdreN is looking forward to the SK matchup

After the match we caught up with Dauren "⁠AdreN⁠" Kystaubayev to ask him about the team's earlier loss to Quantum Bellator Fire and the Space Soldiers match, and to get his thoughts on Gambit's next matchup, SK.

In your second match here you ended up losing to Quantum Bellator Fire in overtime on Inferno, did you expect it to get so complicated?

Yeah, we expected that they were going to play out of their minds. They feel confident playing against CIS teams and we knew that. We knew that everything might not go our way, if they play crazy, like a nothing-to-lose game, so that was pretty much that game we expected to see from them. And it went well for them, but wrong for us. We expected that game, but we didn't know we were going to lose like that.

Towards the end of regulation it even looked like you weren't going to make it to overtime, can you tell me about the end of Inferno?

In the beginning of the T side, we had some crucial rounds that we could have gotten and we just noticed that we can't win any clutch situation, we lost every clutch situation. We wanted to improve our T side during the game and it didn't go well.

Playing on the CT side, we just played our regular gamestyle that we're used to playing all the time, but suddenly we just noticed that when we're trying to do something, they are getting the rounds. When we go passive, they can't do anything. So it worked until some of the guys just called "okay, right now I want to peek" and everything went wrong after that. I think that was one of the main things that we lost the CT side in the overtime, that we decided to do something instead of playing passive, that was the wrong decision.

The first half against Space Soldiers went pretty much perfectly for you with 13 rounds, but it took you almost the entire T side to close things out, what made it so hard?

The main thing on the T side was the gameplan. We knew how they were going to play on the CT side, but we didn't actually know how we can counter it. We had some strats against that kind of a defense, but everything went wrong, they knew what we were going to do.

It was kind of hard, they played really well on the CT side, but thanks to Dosia for taking the round for us, that was a crucial clutch round, after that round we gained more confidence. We just knew that a simple round was going to beat their defense and we just found our simplest tactic to win and it worked.

What are your thoughts on the next matchup, SK?

We always want to play against SK, it's always an interesting matchup, for us especially, because our aggressive against their aggressive style is going to be some beautiful Counter-Strike. We're going to prepare a little bit, but we'll try to play our game, not to focus on their game and we'll see what will happen.

Well, preparing for them might not be very easy anyway, considering they have a stand-in...

Preparing for their game... they're playing a free style, they always find out how to play against you, so we're going to play against them (laughs). There are going to be some mind games, aggressive mind games.

The CIS teams have done well here and at the qualifier, the closest to your heart are AVANGAR of course, what did you think about them and the performance they showed at the qualifier?

We're really happy about AVANGAR. They played five games, they went 2-3, but they had a chance to qualify for the Major. This is good stuff for them, they gained a lot of experience, they're young players, like 17-18 years old, and everything is in their future, everything is in their hands. They can do a lot of stuff, I know that. I hope they're going to improve and not going like star players, they have to improve and be better, and I believe in that.