zews: "We have been wanting to move away from the traditional AWP system"

With a confident showing against Virtus.pro, Liquid has joined the two wins and one loss group at StarSeries i-League Season 4, and are now just one victory away from qualifying for the quarter-finals.

zews is very happy with how NAF fit in the team

In our interview with the team's coach Wilton "⁠zews⁠" Prado, we heard that Liquid were looking to move away from the traditional one AWP system for some time, which made adding Keith "⁠NAF⁠" Markovic a logical choice for them.

You made the lineup change and brought in NAF, which we see now is obviously a good pickup, but looking back at the whole period since you added steel, you didn't really have any time to play out with that roster that had jdm due to roster locks. So how did the decision come to change that early, without really having a good shot with that five?

It's kind of hard to comment on all of this, with jdm there were so many factors to why he was such a good teammate, he was on the team for such a long time, NAF was just an opportunity because he was amazing.

And our team, internally, for a while, we have already been wanting to move away from the traditional one AWP system and move into something more volatile, where we can adapt to situations, and it was really hard to decide on that because Josh has been with us for so long. But at the end of the day, we just decided to take a risk, decided that something needed to change for us to get the energy going within our team.

I would say that now you have, similarly to Cloud9, a strong rifling core and then the AWP is more of a utility thing you have on the team. So how do you think that came up, why was that decision made? It's pretty different to G2, FaZe, other teams that have very strong, impactful AWPers?

After learning how we like to play and the attributes of our players, we know how to play both ways, we know how to play with a fixed AWPer and we know how to play rotating the spots. For us, it works in a sense that, I think we have more than capable riflers so the AWP became more, exactly as you said, a utility thing. If we realize that we need it or if we want to change up and surprise, we pull it out, it's just one of the tricks from our bag. If we don't need it, we can just keep on playing with rifles, because everyone on our team is as good with them as anyone else in CS right now.

So what are your first impressions of NAF? He was in Liquid about two years ago and then went through a lot of different teams and came back, what do you make of him as a player now?

I think NAF is put in a position we need him in, he does the lurking role very well for us, his performances have been amazing, but it's a team effort to put him up there and I think it has been fitting pretty well so far. We are pretty happy with how it started but we still need a lot of practice right now to work out the details.

What did you make of the cs_summit win you achieved last week?

The summit win was really nice because it showed the potential of our lineup and what we can do when we play to our full potential. It is also nice that we beat some amazing teams that were hyped up, such as SK and Cloud9 as the reigning Major champions, but we are not letting it get to our heads, we are not thinking that we are the best team in the world right now.

As I said, we still have a lot to iron out, and even winning at summit we were able to have that as a takeaway, but it's nice to have Liquid's first actual LAN trophy.

You already played three BO3's here, so it's hard to get into every match and game, so can you give me a general overview of what you did so far, what are the takeaways? 

We started off against Astralis, it was a really hard matchup, they came in with a new lineup, which is unpredictable, they surprised us in many ways. Then after that, we played against Renegades, which was a messed up matchup because NAF knew how they play, they know how he plays.

I think today against Virtus.pro was our best showing so far. It was still not perfect, but kind of reminiscent of the summit, we are starting slow but we are grinding and getting into a higher gear, and I hope that's the way it keeps going moving forward. Because when we are going at full speed, we are a scary team to play against.

At cs_summit you had the double elimination BO3, that is something that we didn't have that much last year, but I guess we are going to get it more this year with ESL. And here we have a BO3 Swiss system. A lot of different systems, what do you think about the one we have here?

I like having 16 teams at events, like IEM is going to do, it gives a lot of emerging countries and regions an opportunity to showcase themselves and as we can see with MVP, TyLoo, AVANGAR, QBF, these regions do have potential.

So I really like that about them, and I like the BO3 Swiss system, it's a taxing system because there is a lot of matches and the teams play a lot, the casters, everyone works a lot, but I think it's the fairest. Hopefully, by the end of this event, we will have a better idea of which format we like the most, but I think that so far, it's the BO3 Swiss.