ottoNd on beating mouz: "We can do a lot of stuff individually on those maps and win the rounds by doing that"

After Valiance beat MOUZ for the second time to eliminate the tournament favorites an advance to the playoffs, we spoke to Otto "⁠ottoNd⁠" Sihvo to get his thoughts on the match.

Having lost to Vitality in the winners' match, Valiance went up against MOUZ for the second time in the group stage and stunned the favorites yet again with a clear-cut best-of-three series, in which the squad won Train 16-12 and Cache 16-8.

After the triumph, we got a hold of ottoNd and got his thoughts on the series. We also quizzed him about his addition to the team and how he has accommodated in the roster.

Let's shortly go back to the Vitality match, where it was quite obvious from Twitter that you thought you should have closed out Mirage, what went wrong?

We kept going out A, but we made the same mistakes all the time, we didn't push for map control, we just stayed on site and sandwich and lost every retake situation.

What was the problem on Dust2, then, you just got destroyed there...?

(laughs) Nothing really there for us, we played too slow at the beginning, I think, and they just got the money control, double AWP, and after that, it's really hard to play Dust2.

You beat mousesports for the second time, this time in a best-of-three looking convincing - how did you manage to do that?

Everyone played really well individually, we just hit our shots and had really good communication, and I think that the maps were pretty good for us.

Why is that?

The maps are good for our players, we can do a lot of stuff individually on those maps and just win the rounds by doing that.

Did you do any more of that preparation nexa was talking about yesterday against mousesports?

No, we didn't really have that much time to prepare for today, so we just did our own things and played our own style.

Can you tell me about how adapting to this lineup has been from your point of view as one of the new players in the roster?

In the beginning, I was playing pretty well, but the more structure we added the more I started to struggle because I couldn't do what I wanted to do in default rounds, we just kept doing executes. After the Minor qualifier, I started playing well again because we changed our playstyle our lot. Here, I don't know, the first game was decent and then the second game was f*cking terrible, we just went back to the executes and I'm not playing well when we do that.

nexa was talking about that yesterday, that you are trying to find a good balance between a tactical style and a loose one, so is that the biggest struggle for you?

Yeah. We need to find the right balance, but it has been too far on one of the ends.

What has it been like in terms of communication, given that this is your first international team? Was it a big change for you?

Not really, it took me like two weeks to feel comfortable talking in English and after that, I have just been improving every day. I think the international playstyle fits me more because we can play more loose and I like playing more loose.

Tell me about the playoffs and how confident you are for that, now that you've eliminated the biggest favorites of the tournament.

I think the playoffs will be really hard. I know the guys struggled with Imperial against ENCE every time they played them and I think ENCE is playing really good CS, they have just the right balance between structure and a loose style. It's going to be a tough game tomorrow.

Is there anything you can do to improve your chances given that you played alongside a couple of these players in the past?

I know them and how they like to play, but I think they have changed a lot of stuff in ENCE and it has been quite a long time since I played with them.