coldzera: "The problem is not inside the game; some players have had personal problems"

Throughout Februray SK struggled to live up to their status as a top-two team in the world, placing third at cs_summit 2, 5th-8th at StarSeries, and 7th-8th at IEM Katowice, exiting their last tournament of the month in groups.

coldzera talked about SK's issues throughout February

We got a hold of Marcelo "⁠coldzera⁠" David when the Brazilians came by the press area in Katowice and picked his brain on a few topics, particularly SK's recent issues and map preferences.

SK have been struggling so far this year, ever since you played the Major with felps really, can you tell me what the team's point of view on this is and what the problems are?

When we played with felps at the Major we changed a lot of things with him so that he could play more aggressively. After the Major we tried to play with boltz again, our game style is not the best right now, so we tried to fix the mistakes, but the problem inside the team is not inside the game, it's outside of the game, some players - for this tournament especially - have had some personal problems. We tried to do our best at this tournament, but the problem is not inside the team, it's outside. We tried to fix it, we had a lot of meetings together, so let's see at the next tournament.

Does it have anything to do with confidence as well, having struggled for a longer period of time now?

I don't think it's confidence, but I think we have a little bit of pressure in our game so we didn't play well. We didn't show up at these three tournaments we played, so of course we have a little bit of pressure on ourselves. But particularly at this tournament it's not the pressure, it's not that we played badly as a team, it's personal problems. The decisions were good, but sometimes we come to play the tournament but at the same time we are not here to play. That's a big problem.

Your map pool and vetoes have been a bit confusing from an outsider's point of view, you played a lot of Inferno at StarSeries and here it showed as well, but Overpass has taken a step back even though you didn't suffer many losses on it ahead of Katowice. Can you explain some of your map choices lately? What has changed regarding Overpass?

We aren't feeling good playing Overpass, we play well as T but as CT we do a lot of individual plays, so we don't play compactly. The game against Gambit made us change our idea against Cloud9, we picked Mirage against Cloud9 but two days before that we were going to pick Overpass with everyone. After Gambit made their comeback against us, we were feeling a bit afraid, because we made a lot of mistakes, stupid individual plays, and we changed our pick to Mirage.

About Inferno, we practice a lot of Inferno, our T side is good, as CT we tried to play more aggressive against Gambit and it worked really well, but against Cloud9 we played a little afraid because we were winning, we were playing not to lose. We played not to lose against Cloud9, we stopped playing aggressively in banana, stopped playing aggressively in mid, and we gave the whole map to them. At the moment, the map pool is not good for us because everyone will pick against us and that's why we practice it a lot. On Overpass we're trying to get our confidence back, but at the same time it's hard because we need to play more compactly. That's why we changed Inferno for Overpass.

At which point did you stop being confident on Overpass? Like I said before, your results on it before Katowice haven't been bad at all, only the loss to Cloud9 at Summit comes to mind...

We didn't practice a lot of Overpass because everyone was vetoing it against us. On the internet we started losing it a lot to random teams, we started losing our confidence, and we didn't see the new meta on Overpass, so we stopped playing it. This year we tried to just focus on Inferno, we forgot about Overpass, and when we saw we started losing, our confidence on Overpass went down.

We have 10 days now in Germany for a bootcamp before China, we will try to do our best, we will try to play a lot of maps. I think we'll try to play Nuke. We're going to start playing Nuke now, we were talking yesterday about it. I think we should just play more CS, for us the tournament was hard because we wanted to play on the stage, but it's okay, we have a lot of tournaments to show up at. I think for the next tournaments we will be better.

Going back to the personal problems, is that something that you can get past before WESG?

Yeah, of course. We had a meeting, we talked about it, and everyone said what's happening in everyone's life. I think for the next tournament we will be in a good place.

The last thing I'd like to pick your brain on is tournament formats, we had the BO3 Swiss for the first time at StarSeries and now we saw a new GSL-type format here at Katowice, what are your thoughts on the two?

I think the BO3 Swiss is good. I think in the last interview in Denmark I told you that this is the best way to play Counter-Strike, because to be in the quarter-finals or semi-finals, the teams need to play better than you. Cloud9 made the quarter-finals because they played better than us, it's just good teams going to the quarter-finals. It's the best way to make the tournament good.