Hellpa: "The second tomi left, we knew that NikoM was the player to get"

Isurus were one of the South American teams competing at the WESG 2017 World Finals, but unlike TeamOne who recently moved to the US, Isurus only moved within their continent, and are now competing in Brazil.

Isurus will return to South America and focus on upcoming tournaments

The Argentinians, who are spearheaded by Nicolas "⁠NikoM⁠" Miozzi, didn't make it past the first group stage, but have gained valuable experience, their coach German "Hellpa" Morath says.

Just for the start, for people that don't know you that well, can you give me a short overview of the team, the players in the team and what they do?

The team starts with Nohtse, he is the IGL and AWP. Then we got NikoM, he is our support, nbl is entry fragger and 1962 is also an entry fragger. Lastly, Zote is the lurker.

You moved to Brazil - can you tell me a bit about that, how, why and when it happened?

We moved to Brazil to play the WESG qualifiers because we knew that TeamOne was in Brazil, Vault was in Brazil, Elite Wolves as well. So to not have ping issues, we moved to Brazil and did a bootcamp there. After me made it through the qualifier, we stayed in Brazil, and now after this event, we will go back to Brazil to keep trying.

How big of a ping disadvantage is it playing from Argentina against Brazilians?

The difference in ping is quite significant, they play with 5ms while we have 40-60, depends on which state it is. So it's way better to play in Brazil for that reason.

What is the difference between teams in the region, Brazil and Argentina, what is the competition like?

Last three months, the competition was tough. TeamOne and us, Isurus, are playing in most of the finals. In the WCA finals we won, in WESG they won against us and in the Minor qualifier as well. But the games were always close.

Straka was a part of this team, tell me about his departure, why did that happen?

The departure of Straka happened because he couldn't go to WESG to play with us, he had to focus on his studies. We needed him 100% of the time, and he can't do that, so we let him finish his school and when he is done, maybe we can get him back.

From your country, obviously, the most famous team is the Miami Flamingos/Gale Force squad. What is your take on them and where they are right now? They left the region, but weren't able to break through?

I think the first thing is that they weren't a team going to North America, when they were Miami Flamingos. At first, they were like a mix, they had three Argentinians, one Colombian and one Chilean. Then they changed the roster two times to get a strong base they need and they got some good results like qualifying for DreamHack and playing good against North, that was a close match.

For us, it's hard to move to NA because we don't have many sponsors and we don't have a big  budget. Anyway, it's good being in Brazil right now because there is actually quite a few teams that can compete, TeamOne was there until a month ago, there is FalleN team's YeaH, there is kNgV-'s team that just formed, Tempo Storm that came back from North America. Right now we are trying to compete in the Latin American region.

Coming up to this event, how did you use your time, what was the preparation like?

We trained 10 hours per day, minimum. We think that for this time we have little experience, but next time we can come stronger, with experience from this tournament, and it will help us a lot to perform much better as a team.

Can you give me an overview of your results here, how you thought it went for you?

The first match we played against Space Soldiers on Train, it finished 11-16 for them, and we believed we played well, but even though we thought it was a good score and that we played well, we were kind of sad and low from losing. That was a big part, I think, why we did so poorly against Recca. We were dragging that defeat with us. But after losing to Recca, we were able to bring ourselves back up, and beat Limitless in the last map.

Is there something special that you noticed, something that you need to improve on or something that you learned as a team at this tournament?

Not really, we just need to keep training hard, working as we are, and come back stronger. Because we prepared ourselves and we knew that we could pass through the group stage, but I don't think it's a failure that we didn't since we got a lot of experience in this tournament.

NikoM came into the roster fairly recently and he has been playing pretty well in the region. What is the key thing about him and why hasn't come into the team earlier?

The change came when tomi left for Miami Flamingos. We were looking for a player with similar characteristics, but especially someone that was really hungry and that really wanted to win. So we picked him up and saw instantly that he was giving everything all the time, working really hard. And you can see it just by looking at his past performances in the last tournaments, that he has always been the outstanding player.

We already knew about him before, but we had tomi in the lineup which we felt was a little bit more of an experienced player, especially having played outside of the country, but the second tomi left, we knew that NikoM was the player they would have to get.

When you come back, what's next for you, do you have any goals or tournaments lined up?

We are now playing ESEA and we have to go to the MDL Global Challenge, that is our first goal. Then we have Pro League, now there is a spot for South America and we got an invite to the playoffs. And there is also a ZOTAC Cup in which we are playing also. We are coming back and we are going to play as many tournaments we can to prove that we are ready to compete on a high level.