STYKO: "We were all losing confidence after a bunch of online defeats"

Even though they were the last team to make it to the playoffs, MOUZ didn't have a bad showing in Australia so far. Chris "⁠chrisJ⁠" de Jong's troops lost the upper bracket semi-final to Astralis, who look dominant overall, and picked up convincing wins over BOOT-d[S], MVP PK and G2.

STYKO is focusing more on his individual game after a bad showing in Marseille

Following the final match, we spoke to Martin "⁠STYKO⁠" Styk, who is currently the second-best rated player of his team at the event, discussing MOUZ' last couple of months, dips in form and Dust2.

Marseille was the first event at which mousesports were considered a serious contender for the title, maybe even the favorite, how did that impact you guys as a team, did you feel that in your game?

We didn't feel it at all, but maybe it still affected us somehow mentally, even though we didn't pay attention to it. Everyone was hyping us up, obviously, but when we were coming into the tournament, we were kinda sceptical about our performance because we were not in form. We were losing a lot of online matches, I personally couldn't play that much after the eye surgery I got and, basically, we had problems so we couldn't put 100% into preparation. Individually we felt weak and teamwise we felt weak as well.

Was that the only issue, did you feel like maybe other teams prepared for you more than the usually do, any antistratting or that aspect going in?

Not really, we didn't feel antistratted in Marseille at all. As I said, we were playing our game, we felt comfortable playing it, but we just did individual mistakes that we've never done before, just because of the lack of preparation, I feel like.

The Astralis game here was the first real test you had and you lost pretty convincingly, so what did you make of that game and playing Astralis right now?

First of all, we tried to not think about that game that much because we knew we didn't show up at all, we had a complete off day. It might be because of jetlag or some other things, we just didn't connect to the server at all, all five of us. What we tried to do instead is, we watched the demo thinking that if we lost this convincingly, maybe other teams will watch this demo as well and try to copy what Astralis did that worked against us, we tried to prepare for that.

It perhaps a played a role in the matches today, the veto that MVP and G2 did, maybe that's the reason we played Dust2... it's hard to tell but we didn't pay too much attention to that loss. It happens, every team has off days like this. Some teams, like us, have them more often, and some less.

You played G2 on Dust2, they picked it but you seemed pretty prepared, you had some tactics ready on that map. How do you think it has been going for you, will you be able to make it one of your maps?

We have a really small sample size on which to decide if it is going to be our best map or if it is going to be a bad map, like Cobblestone was before for us. This is just one game, it's the first official game for us, it was the second official game for them. Maybe the style that we decided to use and the clutches that we did made it one-sided in terms of the scoreline, but in fact it was a really hard game, especially against players like kennyS and obviously mixwell, they are a pretty strong duo when it comes to the AWP, and Dust2 is known for being an AWP paradise. On the other hand, we have chrisJ and oskar who are capable of shutting down any sniper duo in the world right now, I feel like they are the best double AWP setup in the world.

That helps, but obviously, we have only a few practices on Dust2, we practiced only a few teams, a few moves, a few strats that we feel like might be useful. Obviously, we used some of them in this match, it worked, maybe if we use them against other top10 teams, 9 out of 10 teams it won't work, because it's such a small sample size, we can't really decide if it's going to be a good map or not. We feel confident on it, I can tell that we like playing it, but it's really hard to tell [how good we will be] right now.

The Slovakian feels that watching KRIMZ's demos helped him improve for this event

You mentioned oskar, the last few events weren't that great for him individually. Is that something tied to classic oskar issues with motivation that we heard about before, is there something else bothering him at the moment?

It's not really a motivation thing, maybe he feels kind of burnt out, but I can't speak for him, obviously. Maybe it was a thing that we were all losing confidence after a bunch of online defeats in ECS and EPL. We were trying to figure out what was wrong, and we felt that individually, we are not putting too much preparation into the game, so we tried to fix it, we had a long team talk after we lost to NiP in ECS, 0-2.

We tried to figure out what was wrong and how to practice in a better way because we have such a busy schedule with tournaments and traveling that it's impossible for us to prepare for all the teams and on all the maps. We decided we have to start practicing on events as well when we have 24/7 practice rooms available because we kind of weren't doing it. We are the kind of team that would rather play FPL or deathmatch or chill during the event to be in a positive mindset, instead of practicing non-stop. So we tried to build a schedule in which we can fit practice as well. Maybe that's why we are playing much better here than in Marseille, there we just played CS, not team CS.

You've been having some nice highlights here, stats are a bit better than usual, is there anything that changed for you personally, how are you feeling right now as a player, as a fragger? 

I don't know, I'm not sure why this is happening but I had some free time before this event that I decided to spend on watching demos, and not on watching positions of players, but the way he plays in a position, even though it has nothing to do with my game. For example, I watched a lot of KRIMZ's demos and the way he is checking everything and moving around the map, it feels like he is just aware of every situation that is possible. Even though I can't really copy his playstyle because he plays at different positions, I took something out of his game, really thought about it and then realized that I can translate it to my positions. That's the way I'm trying to play.

Obviously, it's really hard to implement it because sometimes I feel like I'm not helping my teammates as much as I used to before. Instead of communicating the info better, I'm focusing on my crosshair, which is kind of... really bad. My teammates are used to me being a support player, and right now, rounds happen like in this G2 match or MVP match or Astralis match that I let them down because I didn't do what I'm usually doing—since I was focusing on myself more.

I don't know, maybe it has something to do with my Marseille performance, that was my lowest rated event ever and I had one-on-one talks with the coach on how to improve it, how to avoid that in the future. I think that watching KRIMZ's demos really helped me in terms of this. I don't know, it's just my feeling, maybe it's just a good event, maybe it's just one of those days or one of those weeks where I perform well, it's really hard to tell.