fitch: "I joined this team to win this Minor"

After AVANGAR clinched the first spot in the CIS Minor's upper bracket final, we spoke to Bektiyar "⁠fitch⁠" Bahytov about the team's shaky group stage and the clear-cut win against Spirit.

To start the tournament, AVANGAR passed the opening encounter against pro100 with flying colors, but the tournament's favorites couldn't overcome Winstrike in the winners' match.

That put them in a rematch with their first opponents, which they survived after a close two-map series to make it to the playoffs. There, they have so far looked a lot more convincing with a clean victory against Spirit in the upper bracket semi-final.

Although you didn't play with the team at the time, at the last CIS Minor AVANGAR were favored to make it through but dropped the ball there, did the team approach the tournament any differently this time? How did you prepare?

I wasn't playing for AVANGAR then, but this team probably had some problems with mentality or something. I joined this team to win this Minor, that was personally my main goal. Now, we are playing well, I don't know how it's going to be tomorrow or in the future, but everyone is happy now.

We practiced for like nine days because we had the holidays, the New Year. Then we went to the bootcamp and we had nine days for practice. That's it.

Going back to the group stage, you lost to Winstrike and had a close encounter with pro100, what was the shakiness about?

The main thing was that we didn't expect Winstrike to play Train this well. We made a lot of mistakes against them on the CT side of Train, that was the deciding map. We just lost because of those mistakes, we made a lot of stacks on the B site and they went to A, and we just lost. Against pro100, they just changed a lot of things on the first map, Dust2. We didn't expect that because before that match we won Dust2 16-5 against them, that was pretty easy for us. They just changed a lot of things and were ready for our game on Dust2, but we came back, my teammates did everything well. That's how we won.

Today you looked a lot more convincing with a clean series against Spirit, what changed?

Yesterday and today we watched demos of Spirit and we were ready for all kinds of strats they would try to play. The luck was on our side today, they weren't ready for us to play like that. We didn't expect them to pick Overpass, that was a surprise for us, but we won, it's all about luck today.

In the upper bracket final, would you rather face Winstrike again or play against your former team?

I have two friends in Gambit, Dosia and mou, so, for me, I want to play against Winstrike again, time for revenge probably. Gambit are my ex-teammates and my friends, so it would be better to play Winstrike again.