CeRq: "I think I can show even more"

The big surprise of the first day of the ECS Season 5 Finals in London was NRG beating FaZe to move on to the semi finals. A big part of their succes has been the 18-year-old AWPer, Tsvetelin "⁠CeRq⁠" Dimitrov. We sat down with him to discuss his recent blossoming.

NRG continue their run of taking down big teams, recently beating Liquid in the quarter finals of StarSeries i-League Season 5 and now winning a convincing best-of-one against FaZe.

CeRq managed a 1.56 rating in the victory against a team consisting of some of his biggest heroes, sending them down to the lower bracket and an elimination match on day 2.

We talked with the 18-year-old Bulgarian about his performances at StarSeries and at ECS:

I was watching Twitter while you guys were playing, and your name came up a lot. You've been turning up and showing off your talent, with your awping really being in focus. How do you feel about being the center of attention like that?

I don't really get affected by that. I'm just happy that people think I'm being good. I'm just glad that I'm actually playing with confidence, and not playing like I did before. Before, I had zero confidence and my hands were shaking, but now I'm doing better, and I think I can do even more. A month ago, I was coming into LANs and every morning I was thinking 'I really hope I perform well today', and now I show up and just play my game and I think that's helping me.

So as a young talent without much experience, how do you just make the switch like that? It seems like a hard thing to do - what happened?

I just got tired being bad on LAN. We were doing bad and I was blaming myself because I know I could play way better and I was just hoping I could show it. I guess I'm just emotional. Once we get rolling, and get in the lead, it helps a lot and I tend to cheer up everyone. But then, if we start losing, I go silent. I'm trying to work on that and my team is always there for me, cheering my up.

You seem like really anxious to shed your bad feelings in game and force yourself to cheer up. Do you think there is a limit to how much you can pressure yourself?

Actually I'm trying not to put pressure on myself or my teammates. Every time we play, we have this thing where daps (NRG’s in-game leader) just says 'guys, it's just a video game, just have fun', and that's how we've kept the pressure off ourselves recently and that's what's been helping us a lot.

You've been beating some pretty big names recently, like FaZe today, and you also took down Liquid at StarSeries. How does it feel to play against and beat this big teams?

It's actually crazy. FaZe and Liquid, those are players I've been looking up to for years. So being in the server with them and actually putting up a fight, or even beating them, is a really crazing feeling.

On the AWP'ing side, you're now taking on star players like GuardiaN. What's that like for an 18-year-old talent just recently beginning to show his form?

I'm a huge fanboy of GuardiaN, so it was great just getting to play with him. I really hope we get to play against each other more and that I can keep learning from him.