Hobbit: "We came here with big confidence, [but] we haven't shown our game at all"

We had a quick chat with Abay "⁠HObbit⁠" Khassenov after HellRaisers fell to the 1-2 pool on the second day of IEM Katowice.

HellRaisers are now sitting on a 1-2 record, as they lost to FaZe and beat ENCE on day one, while day two saw them concede a one-sided Overpass to Ninjas in Pyjamas.

After their encounter with the Swedes, we caught up with HObbit to ask about how HellRaisers have changed following the departure of Ivan "⁠Johnta⁠" Shevtsov and the promotion of former analyst Amiran "⁠aMi⁠" Rehviashvili to the team's coach and pick his brain on why the team has been struggling at the Major thus far.

You had somewhat of a rough ending to 2018 with some early exits and you haven't played anything on LAN since then, what have you been up to?

When I came to this team, we had some problems with the mental side and the atmosphere, our coach left and we brought in the former analyst. He's helping us a lot. In 2019 we just made a lot of goals, the first was to be Legends at this Major and the second goal is to become a top-five team in the world.

What is the difference between Johnta and aMi?

Johnta and aMi are really different guys. I can explain - Johnta is more structured and a coach like in sports, it's all about mental, food, what time we should wake up, and some of our guys didn't like it. aMi is like a friend to everyone, he's very calm and a very good guy and he's helping us a lot in terms of atmosphere and mentality. He's doing a lot of stuff, he's funny and because of that, our team has a good atmosphere.

You haven't gotten off to a very good start at the Major, so far with a 1-2 record with big losses to FaZe and NiP, what have been the biggest struggles you have faced?

To be honest, I don't know what is going on right now because we came here with big confidence. We just lost our first game and we made unlucky decisions, we just didn't wake up. The second game [on Dust2 against ENCE] was pretty good for us, we had a very good T side and despite a comeback from ENCE, we did very well and we closed the map. And the third map versus NiP, we practiced a lot of Overpass versus them and we knew how they were going to play. They are playing very aggressively and randomly as a CT side on Overpass, so we couldn't do some stuff that we prepared for them because we didn't know how they were going to play, they were playing very aggressively, pushing every time and playing randomly. Today, they just showed us a really good CT side, they played very well, they did some antistrats, we lost the first two gunrounds and after, we just couldn't do anything.

What can you fix for the next rounds? Do you believe you can still come back in the best-of-three series, is your map pool strong enough for that?

I believe we can come back, we can do our best. We didn't show our game at all, we practiced a lot and we had really good results. I think it will be better in best-of-threes.