YNk on Astralis rematch: "When you play an opponent so often, you create a metagame for that matchup"

We spoke to MIBR's coach, Janko "⁠YNk⁠" Paunović, following their 2-1 win over North in ECS Season 6 semi-finals.

MIBR have made it to the grand final after grabbing convincing victories on Train and Dust2, with North securing Inferno as the second map in comfortable fashion, as well. That sets YNk's men on a collision course with Astralis, whom the Brazilian-American side defeated in the group stage of the tournament.

We talked to the coach about the series against North, as well as the upcoming rematch in the grand final, which is set to take place on Sunday.

Let's start with the veto, which was interesting in a few ways, mainly because of Dust2 making it through as the last map instead of Cache, so talk me through the reasoning.

Yeah, the way we ended up on Dust2 instead of Cache was that I was with FalleN and we were watching both maps, and looking at them we felt like the style how they liked to play Dust2 was something that we could have a good time playing against. It was just that for us, it was more or less the same, so we were just looking at what we thought was kind of weaker for them.

I know they don't play Cache that much, but they started playing it and they started winning, so we thought they haven't played Dust2 in a while, they'll probably be a bit out of their comfort zone, so let's just go for that.

Were you expecting Train to be their pick, or where did you think that was going to go?

We were thinking they were going to pick Train or maybe that they were going to pick Dust2 as a curveball on us, we had a couple of big losses in our recent history on the map, so we were kind of thinking one of those two maps was going to be their pick.

But when I first started looking, I thought they could pick anything, we had to prepare for almost six maps, at least go through them a little bit because the only thing we knew wasn't going to be played was Nuke. (laughs)

On Inferno, you had a lot of problems on the T side, you couldn't get into it, what were the issues there?

I think the problem was that we just didn't adjust in time to what they were doing, they are a team that likes to go for a lot of setups, they pick where they want to go for their fight and you need to approach that as a team.

And we were going for a lot of individual plays, I think people got a little bit complacent after the first map because we were getting caught, we weren't shoulder-peeking as much, we were just strafing into their setups and into their angles, and a couple of mistakes in the reset rounds gave them the control of the economy. They just played a really strong CT side, so props to them.

Dust2 was straightforward on the T side, but as CT it took you quite a long time to close things out, only after you took a timeout towards the end did you finish it off - was there anything in particular that you changed, talked about?

Yeah, I think we got pretty good reads on what they want to do, even in the second round that we lost, between halves I told them that that's what was going to happen, so play for that. And we didn't do a good job of executing that, so they got a bit of momentum with their fast-paced game, so we just figured that we needed to play a bit more compact.

We had a big lead so there was no reason to go for any forcebuys, halfbuys, just take the eco, make sure we have everything we need so that we can play our own game. In the end, we got a couple of good reads on them and we managed to close it out.

Heading into the rematch against Astralis, they are the team that does learn quickly from their mistakes, it's hard to beat them twice, so what are you guys going to do to make sure that doesn't happen?

I think that's going to be extremely hard because beating Astralis once in a best-of-three is already hard enough, but doing it twice at the same tournament is going to be a lot more difficult. The thing is, we have a rivalry going on, we met pretty often in the recent times, it's similar to what FaZe and Astralis had last year. When you play an opponent so often, you kind of create a metagame for that matchup, Astralis play a way against us which they might not play against other teams, and it's similar for us.

Now it's going to be the next level of mind games, what are people going to do, how are they going to play... I think it's important not to get too carried away with thinking about the mind games and focus on the fundamentals because as long as you do that, sure, you're probably going to lose a round here and there to a smart play from them, but that's going to give you the highest chance of winning. If you forget your fundamentals and get too into the mind games, start overthinking everything, that's when you can just find yourself not even knowing what you're playing and you end up losing a lot of rounds. I think it's going to be about looking at the past game, what is it that we could do maybe a bit better and just look at the veto a little bit, that's pretty much it.

When I was talking to gla1ve about the group stage match, he was talking about individual performances being the difference, particularly from FalleN and fer, is that something you agree with? Was it the next level from those two players that got you over the hump?

I think it definitely helped, the individual performances, FalleN had 60 AWP kills out of the 80 kills, Train was vintage FalleN and fer also had some big rounds throughout the series. Yeah, they stepped up individually, but I wouldn't say that that was the only reason why we won the game. Some of the maps were really close and we again had the lead in those maps, we kind of let them come back into it. The individual performances wouldn't be as necessary if we weren't making some of those mistakes, it had to be FalleN bringing us back into the round, or fer in that 30th round of Train where tarik got the 1v2, he got two kills with 4 HP, that was huge.

I think it definitely helped, but you could say the same for their team, as well, how many times have we lost a massive clutch to Xyp9x or how many times has gla1ve gotten a lot of high-impact kills? That's the beauty of the matchup, you're going to have two teams who are going to play strong CS, but there are also going to be highlight moments from both teams. If you ask me, I would probably say that on average it probably evens out when you look at our past matchups, they've had the upper hand in those close games every time until the last time, so we are hoping to keep that streak going.