kennyS: "If someone wants to get better on Vertigo, they should definitely watch mousesports"

We had a chat with Kenny "⁠kennyS⁠" Schrub after G2 made it through to the New Legends stage with a 3-1 record.

G2 have become the third team to make it through the New Challengers stage, though not before tough series against MOUZ and FORZE, in which the French side struggled to close out Dust2 on the CT side despite strong starts on the offense.

After kennyS's team overcame the Russians to push through to the New Legends stage, we got a hold of the star AWPer to ask him about the struggles G2 faced on the CT side of Dust2 on both occasions and get his thoughts on the new Vertigo, which was played in their series against MOUZ.

Let's touch on the mousesports series. You started off great on Train but then on Dust2 you threw away an 11-4 lead, what happened there on the CT side afterward?

I think we've been taken in the snowball and no one was clear enough to have the good reactions. And, like today, it was really difficult, we managed to show the resilience we didn't have yesterday. I think that's the kind of game that might be useful for us in the future and even for the next day, for today. They've been playing pretty much like we used to on the T side and that was really disturbing for us, we definitely have weaknesses on the CT side of Dust2 since we haven't really practiced it. We put our focus somewhere else because we felt like we needed to put our focus somewhere else.

The good thing is that we're going to have a few days now to fix those issues, I know that this team learns pretty fast and we get results pretty quickly, as well. So yeah, we didn't give up yesterday, but we didn't have the solution. The sad thing is that we actually came up with the solution, but like five minutes after the map, which can happen most of the time, to be honest. I think we just played scared and despite the fact that we had a pretty heavy lead, we felt like they were like 60 on the map, every area of the map we weren't secure, we were struggling, and we were getting super paranoid about the smallest things. We pretty much got into kind of a panic and we never really managed to get out of it, so that was the sad point.

You also played Vertigo in that series in your first time on the new version in an official match. You seemed to struggle a lot on the CT side there, why was that?

I think we're not used to it yet, to be honest. Vertigo is not showing our real level, to be honest, we have a super good CT side on Overpass, for example, which was not the case in Chicago. I think we progressed in many ways, in many areas, but since we didn't have like a month of bootcamp you can't focus on everything, and we also tried to work on a lot of other things already. It's been difficult because if you focus on a lot of things, your mind and your brain is thinking a lot, so you don't necessarily have the results you expect to have straight away. That's why people say, you work hard, but the work doesn't pay off straight away, it is what it is. I think it paid off in certain areas, but we still have some weaknesses that we're going to fix.

I was talking to dephh about the new version of the map generally, about the changes, and he was saying it was a little less T sided than it used to be. What are your thoughts on the new version and the balance?

Well, I think how mousesports plays it is really interesting, they take control of B really easily. B got smaller, so it's really hard for the T to just hide underneath the stairs and that kind of thing, so that obviously makes it more CT-sided. But also, the new room is really good for flanking, but it also makes the T side play more in middle. No one was really playing middle in the old version except for one guy lurking sometimes, this area wasn't really used. Yeah, the map is more balanced and more playable and watchable due to the fact that we can actually play many areas on the map. The fact that the CT side can take B so easily creates space on middle an A, so you have to take that space, otherwise it's complicated for you. Yeah, I think mousesports have been playing super well on the map. If someone wants to get better on the map, they should definitely watch them, like we could do (laughs). The changes on B make the biggest difference, to be honest.

You've touched on the forZe series earlier, obviously you had some of the same issues as against mousesports yesterday, especially on Dust2 CT side, but even on Inferno in the second half, where it took you a long time to close it out, as well. Was that just psychological, or where do you think is the main issue regarding these last two series?

The game yesterday [against mouz] was quite hard for us, we still had it in our mind today, to be honest, that's probably why we were a bit scared of the comeback. The good thing is that we had the resilience today to actually win Dust2, having a few players that were clear-minded and having a good game also changed that fact because yesterday everyone was pretty much overwhelmed, I guess. But today, we had one or two players that drove us towards the right direction, so it helped and we managed to have pretty good resilience, which we didn't have yesterday. Inferno was quite the same, a super good CT side and a big lead on T side, but we still had that mouz game in our mind. But we made it and it's gone, so the next matches won't be the same, I think we won't struggle as much to close out games, hopefully.

Do you think that's going to be the main focus in the next couple of days you have before the next stage?

Obviously, we're going to make sure that our CT side is going back to what it used to be, which means super strong, on Dust2. Yeah, we might have a few talks about our mindset regarding the comebacks, but I don't think we're going to make it such a big deal because it's not that important in the end, we went through that and that was the main goal even though it was harder than it should have been today. It doesn't matter, I think we're going to have a fresh mindset for the Legends stage.