Gratisfaction: "We can always take back home everything we learn from these tournaments"

Our next interview from Dallas is with Sean "Gratisfaction" Kaiwai, who discussed a variety of topics with us regarding the event and Grayhound's upcoming qualifier for the Asia Minor.

After impressing at IEM Sydney, Grayhound were unable to show up in similar form at ESL Pro League Season 7 Finals only a week later, as they finished last after losses to Liquid and Renegades.

We talked to the team's AWPer, Sean "⁠Gratisfaction⁠" Kaiwai, during the quarter-finals day in Dallas to find out what happened and ask him about the team's outlook for the upcoming Asia Minor qualifiers.

I imagine your expectations at this event had been higher than how you did in the end, especially coming here straight after Sydney, why do you think you weren't able to replicate some of your previous success?

We really wanted to do better than how we did, we were expecting a win versus Liquid to be honest, they've been playing well at this event, which makes it a lot harder. Most of the problem was just that communication was off, everyone was kind of jetlagged, yeah, jetlag kind of contributed to it a lot, everyone was a bit spaced out in our matches and haven't fixed it.

After your first two big experiences at the big events, have you noticed anything that you will come back home to fix? What have you taken away from these two tournaments?

It was good to play against the international teams and see that we could put up numbers against the top teams in the world. IEM Sydney especially, beating SK and doing so well against FaZe was really good. Most of the mistakes we make are really small, minuscule things, individual players know that they've made a mistake when they make it and you can fix it. Our teamwork at IEM Sydney was way better, but at this competition, the comms were off and it threw off our game.

Despite the result here, are you still positive about getting this experience then?

Yeah, for sure, everything we learn from these competitions, we can always take back home and improve on it, and just be the most dominant team in Australia. Hopefully, we'll just keep getting opportunities like this by qualifying and then coming to the events.

We saw ORDER do quite poorly at the Global Challenge right after Sydney as well, do you feel like your region's second chance to show yourselves came too quickly, as you didn't get to reflect on what you learned in Sydney and were immediately thrown into another tournament?

Yeah, it definitely contributed, we have a bunch of things happening back home in Australia right now that we're kind of working out right now, like real-life situations, and it kind of meant that we didn't have time to prepare for every game here as much as we would have. Our coach was kind of MIA as well, he was doing a bit more work at IEM Sydney and this event he just disappeared.

Tell me about your next couple of months, I'm sure you're mainly looking at the Asia Minor, what goals do you have for the next period?

Mostly just practicing hard, we're going to be bootcamping probably all the way up until the Major, or the Minors in London, but I think we have like two days of practice before we play the Minor qualifiers, so, hopefully, that goes well and we actually make it to the Minor. Otherwise, it would be really unfortunate, but if we make it to the Minor then it'll just be a hard bootcamp. If not, then we'll still be practicing hard.