zews: "We are better at dealing with pressure than people imagine"

After his team secured another grand final, we sat down with Wilton "⁠zews⁠" Prado from Liquid to talk about the BIG matchup, the AUG, and the upcoming match against NRG.

Liquid have looked strong throughout the tournament in Malta, topping their group before handling BIG in the semi-final. There have been some hiccups, NRG took a map off of them earlier and BIG put some pressure both on Inferno and Overpass, but Liquid held strong and find themselves in the grand final.

Shortly after the semi-final, we sat down with Liquid' coach zews to talk about the game against the Germans, adaptations within it, and gauged his thoughts on the scoped weapons and how they fit in his team's dynamic.

Starting with the BIG game and the maps you ended up on, did you feel like you got the upper hand in the veto?

Yes and no. I think we have a better map pool than them so the veto would work for us regardless, but we were caught off guard, we thought they would come with Dust2 just from their track record. I'm guessing that they tried to pick to our weakness instead of their strength, which to me shows a little bit of a lack of confidence. When we saw the map veto, we didn't have anything to study off of them, at least on Overpass, but we had done our work on Inferno, Nuke, Dust2, even Cache, so we were prepared, we were pretty ready for this match.

Starting off on Inferno, the T side, it seemed like you were getting into the sites, which can often be the issue on Inferno, but in the end, they were retaking. How did you see that T side developing, what did you see as the issue?

We didn't follow our game plan for the T-side specifically, we started doing full executes but we knew that they like to give banana up a lot, specifically, and we were going to abuse that with some contacts, which worked in the beginning. We took B, but we got to give props to BIG, they have some really good retake flashes, molotovs, their reads are good. There was a 2v2 on the A site where both of our players got blind from Lane with an insane flash from them.

Yeah, we lost some situations and we could've done a lot better, we should've done. Seeing the match, as soon as it was over, we talked about it and said - if we did what we talked about, we would've destroyed them. So then we lost the pistol, we got a little mad because could've had the force-buy as well, didn't get it, but luckily won the next one and then we were able to actually control their economy, we reset them every time and we just showed our strength.

You mentioned them having an insane flash, generally, people like to talk about BIG being a good team utility-usage wise. Do you see that when you play against them, that they have something additional to the average team?

I think that they use utility very well, but if you understand what they are doing and if you study their thought process behind it, try to understand it, you can counter them. It is different to Astralis, for example, for BIG I wouldn't say that it is as much situational, it is more of a pre-thought plan. Astralis has many options they can do and they will always choose the correct one. So BIG are really good with their nade usage, but maybe with a little bit more map control they can impose their grenade usage more.

Moving onto the second map, Overpass, you started on the T side. smooya, in general, didn't have a good game, was there anything special that you felt you were doing to punish the way he has been playing?

Not necessarily, I noticed he didn't have a great game on Overpass, he had one or two rounds where he got some nice reads and got the picks, but like we said, since we didn't prepare for this, we really just played what we thought was the correct way and TACO did a good job on giving the information on how they were playing at B. We were able to, with our default, get the kills and map control for Lane and Bathroom and that helps so much, especially on a map like Overpass where rotations are fast, where if you get the kill, you can kind of toy with them and force their rotations so you can hit the other site.

About closing the game on the CT side, in most of the rounds it seemed like you had some play that you were trying to do or did it correctly, but in the end something would fall through. From your, coaching perspective, how did you see that playing out?

Overpass specifically, when we started on CT we were doing ok, but then I think we got, not overconfident, but we started going for some early-round peeks and trying to get the early round advantage. That is when we started getting punished. We had the double-Monster peek and the Blue Door peek punished, the latter was countered by a great read by smooya.

At 13-10 I took a pause and asked everyone that, since we didn't have the information about how they play, to play our default safer and try to break them around the 30-40 second mark in the round. And we'd be able to save some utility as well, and brought out the double AWP setup because that just helps us save that utility. Luckily in the next round NAF was able to get a pick for us and that just made it that much easier to hold the utility so they couldn't execute on us, or even surprise us.

Talking in general now, as a coach you are looking for the smallest of margins to get advantages. What do you think about the AUG? Technically, it seems like the better weapon, would you like for all of your players to use it?

Not all of them, because as much as some stats, the fire rate, the first bullet accuracy and the headshot from close being an automatic kill is good, it does have a slower movement speed and just the fact that you have a scope normally puts you in a more baity way of playing, you are clearing angles like that, and with the AK you can clear spaces faster. The weapon is good, but you can't underestimate that these players have eight to ten thousand hours with the AK or on the CT side with the M4. So you can't always be changing that because the recoil control you have is a lot of muscle memory, even your movement changes a lot, just the little jiggle peeks you can do.

I think that every team should have one player that uses it [more often], everyone should be able to pick it up though, but I don't believe everyone should be changing to it. You have to have it, but it has to be a balanced situation.

I have to ask you, you are going into the grand final and you already had a couple of grand finals where you were the favorites, but now it is even more the case and it is the smallest tournament yet. So is there any pressure to close it out now, playing against NRG, the rivalry and all that?

Of course, there is the pressure of the final, no one likes having the second place hanging above them all the time. I feel like the only final we were the favorites was New York, on top of mousesports with Snax, the rest were pretty much Astralis, which I don't think we were ever favorites in those situations, at least not to us.

But we will deal with the pressure, we are better at dealing with that than people imagine. Everyone is going to have a match, I don't care if it is Astralis, Na`Vi, MIBR, Liquid, everyone has their moments of pressure. It is how you deal with it and how you move forward [that matters], and as long as you can identify the pressure, you can control it. You can't let it get out of control, it is as simple as that. Coming here, it is a domestic matchup so it is going to feel like less of a final and more of just a routine thing, and I honestly believe this is going to be a 50-50 matchup, just on that alone.