svyat: "We have a good map pool, we will feel comfortable in BO3s"

We heard from Svyatoslav "⁠svyat⁠" Dovbakh after his squad DreamEaters took down Vitality to get one win away from the New Legends Stage of the StarLadder Major.

The CIS side added another big scalp to their name and after beating NRG in the opener of the StarLadder Major Main Qualifier, as they took down Vitality in the 1-1 pool.

DreamEaters' victory over Vitality was a tightly-contested 16-14 on Inferno, which puts them one BO3 victory away from advancing to the next stage of the event. To hear about how the team feels and how they managed to pull off their upsets, we talked with the team's leader svyat.

Most of the teams took some time off during the player break, you had the Minor that ended pretty late. So in the weeks since the Minor, what did you do, did you take a break, play through, bootcamp?

We had a week-long break, after it we came back to a bootcamp. We spent two weeks there, we made our things, tried to get our individual form back up, analyzed our games at the Minor, fixed our mistakes and added a few new rounds, new strats, to not let our opponents read us like a book. That's all.

Going into the NRG game, some people commented that it seemed that you played as if you knew what they were doing at all times. Did you put in a lot of work to anti-strat them for that game?

We anti-stratted them, but not that much. We just know that they play really simple, they play together, they play very obviously to us. We didn't prepare all of these anti-strats for them, we just searched for information during the match and worked off of that.

You had leads in the NRG game and, to some degree, the Vitality game. Something that people have been talking about regarding you is that you can't close out maps. Did closing the NRG game give you a boost in that regard, that you can do it in the big matches?

I think we made it past the barrier of not being able to close games. Maybe it helped us versus Vitality but this game wasn't like the one versus NRG when we were winning like 15-6, this one was really close and we were just trying to be relaxed, calm, and it worked.

Touching on the Vitality game, they have ZywOo who is a top2 player in the world at the moment, and in the game he didn't have much impact. Was there anything special you did to shut him down? How did it feel to play against him?

I didn't feel ZywOo in the game particularly, but we also didn't do some special anti-ZywOo strats. We just played our game and ZywOo didn't find himself in our game.

The CT side looked rough in the beginning and at one point you called that pushed through mid, traded some frags, got the round, and after that you managed to win the game. Tell me about that call, who called it, where did it come from?

I don't remember who called it, maybe I did, I don't know. (laughs) We just, like I said on the interview on stage, we looked at how Vitality plays and we got an understanding of their game style, their timings - we read them and called this push. And it worked.

You are 2-1 and are going into the BO3s. People will surely doubt you at the next step, do you have what it takes to go through to the next stage?

We have a good map pool, we will feel comfortable in BO3s. I don't think it is something new for us, a new stage or something like that. We are just awaiting our next opponent, we will prepare for him and we will play.

Anything you want to add?

Just thanks to everyone that is cheering for us.