Lekr0: "We haven't had much practice; we're not even sure what maps are good for us"

Ninjas in Pyjamas have qualified for the playoffs at StarSeries and we managed to catch up with Jonas "⁠Lekr0⁠" Olofsson.

After five days of play in China, Ninjas in Pyjamas made it to the playoffs from the fifth round, defeating Spirit following a close series to secure a 3-2 record in the Swiss group stage.

The Swedes have been playing a wide variety of maps since their addition of William "⁠draken⁠" Sundin, so we asked Lekr0 about their map pool and why Dust2 fits the team better than Inferno, which they have been vetoing consistently throughout the tournament.

He also commented on the team's success in pistol rounds at the Chinese tournament and discussed their latest series against Spirit:

You played a lot of different maps at BLAST and the trend seems to be continuing here, you have picked Overpass, Train, Nuke, and Mirage. Tell me what the thinking is behind that.

Yeah, we're not even sure what maps are good for us. Right now, when we added draken, it's a lot of different positioning and how he plays with the AWP aggressively, so we're just trying to figure out what we play well. We haven't had much practice, maybe a week before we went to BLAST, so there wasn't a lot to see. But we're just trying it out during practice and official games, we'll see what we're good at.

What led you to introduce Dust2 instead of Inferno in particular?

When we practiced Inferno and in official games as well, we played really badly. I don't think we really grasped how to play it and I'm not comfortable calling on it either, so I think that's mostly why. On Dust2 we seem to have it figured out, people are comfortable in the roles and the positioning, so I think we're playing really well on it right now.

It also helps that you have a dedicated AWPer now...

Yeah, for sure. We introduced it later on with dennis as well, so we had decided to play Dust2 even before that, but now we just had to add an AWPer and it was really easy. Positioning and not having two secondary AWPers makes it easier.

You've been very successful at pistol rounds here at StarSeries, is that something you focused on in particular? How do you approach them?

I'm not really sure, we're just trying to gamble a lot right now. We like to gamble and then we just switch it up with defaults because everyone is really comfortable on pistol rounds, so I don't think anyone can really read what we're going to do. If someone has a feeling they're going to push something we'll adjust our pistol strat to that, at least on CT sides. On T sides we just have different sets of pistol rounds.

In this series against Spirit, on Nuke you dropped the ball on the CT side, going from 7-0 to 8-7, what went wrong in that second part?

I just felt like we individually missed a lot of shots as CT in the end. It felt like they might have had some plan, but it didn't feel like we were guessing what they were doing, we knew what was coming. Like when we played against Na`Vi yesterday, it was the same, we kind of knew exactly what was coming all the time, but we still didn't manage to close the rounds out. It's a bit frustrating, but it was just some individual mistakes, I think.

The rest of the map wasn't very comfortable either, it took a 1v2 from f0rest to avoid overtime, and on Mirage you also struggled a lot. What was it about Spirit that made you struggle?

I just think with one week's practice, I think we played Nuke twice only with draken, so we kind of don't even know how our rotations go. Sometimes the CTs get messed up, but as T when he is playing AWP we haven't even practiced that yet, so it's different for everyone, what nades to throw... I don't think we've taught him all the rounds yet, so there's a lot of things to go through in practice, but we have so many maps we play right now, so I think it might take some time.

You've now mentioned multiple times that the practice wasn't really there considering you played two events with draken in the three weeks or so since you made that change, so what do you want to take away from this event?

Personally, I'm just playing every event to win it, no matter what the situations are, just play your best and always try to win, I think that goes for everyone. We're just trying to win the event.

But what is that going to take given that you really don't have the preparation to back it up?

I don't think you always need to be fully prepared. I think if you prepare for the opponent the day before or something, I think that's enough. We don't focus on watching demos too much before the event and stuff like that, so with the practice we had, with the circumstances we were in at the beginning, we're just trying to do our best with it.