JaCkz: "I felt really good in G2 straight away; we are all equal in the game"

We spoke to G2's new recruit Audric "⁠JACKZ⁠" Jug about his last tournament with 3DMAX and joining the big boys of French Counter-Strike.

Last week, while G2 were at the ESL Pro League S8 Finals with their old roster, JACKZ and Lucas "⁠Lucky⁠" Chastang attended their last event with 3DMAX. They first won ESEA MDL, securing the team a spot in the next season of Pro League, before taking the ESEA Global Challenge LAN title as well.

In Abu Dhabi, things didn't kick-off so well for the Frenchmen, starting with a loss to FORZE before taking a strongly contested victory over ShotCallers. At the end of their long first day at PLG Grand Slam, we interviewed JACKZ, with translation help from the team's coach Damien "⁠maLeK⁠" Marcel.

I want to start with your first LAN with the team, DreamHack Winter, obviously not the result you were looking for, but what was it like playing at a fairly big LAN and playing on a team that is G2, with big players like shox and kennyS?

We didn't play that much before the tournament, we played for one week or something, and still, we felt quite confident. I felt really good in the team straight away, with my positions and skill wise, I'm fitting in pretty well. The mood is great also and the three "old" guys made sure that we are all equal in the game and the atmosphere is friendly. So that's it. Of course, the results could've been better but we know that we were going to be doing something better soon.

As was mentioned in the interview we did with maLeK at EPL, he said you are balancing the new and the old players, so everyone has a voice in a way. So my question is do you feel similarly to how you were feeling back in 3DMAX, are you open to doing whatever you want on the team?

It is not really the same now as it was on 3DMAX just because with 3DMAX we worked a lot and the playbook was really deep with a lot of strategies and adaptations during the rounds, we worked a lot, on many, many things during the six months. In G2 it is more on the fly, the beginning, with the very basics, so it is not really the same. But in the meantime, I know I can call whatever I want whenever I want as well. I feel as good on both teams, but on the server, we need more time to get on the same level.

You just played two tournaments with 3DMAX in the United States, the MDL Global Challenge and the MDL Grand Final. Was it kind of a bittersweet thing to say farewell and qualify for EPL?

We started from the bottom, and honestly, it is a great story. We knew that we had a lot of potential and we wanted to finish on a high note to prove it to ourselves and everybody else. It went really well, I didn't think it could be that nice and that it could go so well in the game and outside of the game at this tournament. We knew that we could do something OK, like qualifying for EPL, but we didn't expect we would feel that comfortable, basically handling the LAN A-Z.

Even though the scores were tight sometimes, we really felt that the event was "easy", not in a disrespectful way to anyone, the flow of it was just nice for us.

So coming here, you lost the first match and the second two maps weren't that easy. Obviously, there were delays and all of that, so tell me first of all, the map against forZe, how did you manage to lose it actually?

First of all, me and Lucky are really tired because we just arrived from the US and the jetlag is affecting us. It is not an excuse anyway, it was actually going quite well, we lost the pistol round but still were leading 8-2, so it was OK that far. We started to lose some rounds by losing some focus, being overly relaxed. And then it starts slipping away and the game starts being a little weird. It is quite hard to feel the game properly. And since we didn't play in a while, and we are up since 8 AM since we are supposed to play early and then finally we play at 8 PM.

On the T side we have been running around so much, not being able to slow down, do stuff cleanly, unable to take zones, chill and then finish on sites properly. We'd basically run around thinking... I don't know what we were thinking actually. That game just slipped away, that is the feeling. But when we went outside, we talked to each other for two minutes and we just felt like "OK guys, we just need to enter the next game properly, sleep well, and win the next games".

The next game, against Shotcallers, they are a outsider team, comparing them to forZe, who are at least a European team people know about. These guys are total unknowns internationally and the first map was very close and the second one was decently contested. What happened and how was it playing against these guys?

Skill-wise, they were quite good, they were hitting some nice headshots and it was really hard to prevent what they could do, they actually played really, really, really super, super slow. And it was just not that easy. We actually couldn't impose our game, same as the game before actually, it was just quite tough today to play clean and to just do the job. It was tough. We know that we can be really, really good quickly, but for now, we feel like there is something that is not allowing us to use our full potential, that is holding us down.