Gratisfaction: "After the Pro League loss versus Liquid, something has clicked and I feel better than before"

After Renegades became the first team to secure a berth in the playoffs upper bracket of StarSeries i-League Season 8, we talked to Sean "⁠Gratisfaction⁠" Kaiwai.

The AWPer discussed his individual improvement in Turkey, where he is so far having his best tournament since IEM Katowice thanks to a great level in series versus fnatic and Vitality, which have secured Renegades the first seed in Group A and a place in the upper bracket of the upcoming playoffs.

Gratisfaction also explained how the team has managed to recover from their slump earlier in the year following the player break, highlighting a productive team talk and improved practice.

These past two series against fnatic and Vitality have seen a big improvement in performance from you individually compared to the last few tournaments, what do you think that has been down to?

I don't know, I think the past few tournaments that I've had were pretty s**tty in terms of my individual performance and it was mostly down to mentality. I just wasn't as confident in myself as I could have been, but after that Pro League loss versus Liquid, I don't know, something has just clicked and I feel better than before.

Any particular reason for that?

Not really. I had a talk with our sports psychologist and talked about confidence and I'm just feeling more confident now. When you're more confident, everything kind of works for you.

Quite a dominant run from the team at this tournament so far, especially in this last series against Vitality outside of that stretch on Nuke where it swayed. What has been the key to that run so far?

I'm not sure, to be honest. Vitality haven't been playing their best recently and that's probably just because they've changed players, so they're still showing the ropes to a new player. We've just been playing well, having good communication. Whenever we have good comms, we always play well, so if we keep that through to the finals, then we could take the thing. Touch on wood [knocks on the table].

With that semi-final showing at the Major and a great start here, it seems like you've recovered from the slump earlier in the year. Have you breathed a sigh of relief that that is gone or do you feel like that version of Renegades could still come back?

I don't think so. We all knew when we were going through that slump that we basically got f**ked around by the visa issues and, because of that, we kind of fell behind on practice and the meta. But we've changed our gameplay and we're just trying to keep up to date with all the current strats and with what everyone is doing and we have players of a good caliber, so we can obviously compete with the best.

I talked to jks during that period and he was saying pretty much the same thing, that it was mostly about catching up with practice. Do you think that's all there was to it?

I guess that after I came back — because there had been a bad run when I wasn't there — the team environment was kind of sketchy. We had this talk that if this stuff doesn't change then the team was probably going to fall apart if we weren't playing well, it was a really healthy team talk and everyone came back to the next bootcamp after the break completely changed from how it was before then. And from there we've just been going up again.

Considering the way this tournament is set up in a holiday resort and offers a whole lot of things to do outside of CS, how are you approaching that with Renegades, making sure you're staying professional?

We're not really slacking off, obviously. I haven't even been to the pools yet, I've just been sleeping, CS, eating, that's it. But, obviously, we'll have a little break this afternoon probably and explore the hotel a bit more. It's been pretty easy to stay clear of all the relaxation type things, but I don't know what other teams are doing, I think I've seen people down in the bungalows drinking (laughs).