stanislaw: "fnatic is probably the toughest opponent here right now"

We interviewed Peter "⁠stanislaw⁠" Jarguz after Evil Geniuses joined fnatic in the upper bracket final at StarSeries i-League Season 8.

The in-game leader went back to the team's last-place exit at DreamHack Masters Malmö and talked about Evil Geniuses' recovery at StarSeries, where the North American side initially dropped down to their group's lower bracket following a convincing loss to Ninjas in Pyjamas before going on a run all the way to the playoffs' upper-bracket final.

stanislaw also commented on the loudness the team has been showcasing throughout the tournament, especially in their encounter with HEROIC earlier in the tournament, and previewed the upcoming match against fnatic.

Let's start with the last-place exit in Malmö right after your win in New York. Did you just shrug that off as a one-off or did you think there were things to fix there?

I think it was a mixture of both. We shrugged it off as well as analyzed it as best we could because against Grayhound, Nuke was one of our maps and we let that slip through, and then we got 2-0d by mousesports, where we felt like we made a lot of mistakes. There were a lot of unfortunate circumstances like the travel day being one day before and we were very jetlagged and tired and that setup wasn't ideal, but we just did what we could. We went back, watched the games, fixed our mistakes, and that's about it.

Starting off here, you lost the second series to NiP convincingly on two of your best maps, what happened there and how did you manage to recover from that, especially seeing as you beat NiP on the same maps just a couple of days later?

Yeah, against NiP we felt like it was another off-day for us. We just played a little bit differently than we normally do and we weren't as confident as we normally would be. But yeah, again, same theme as always, we just went back to the room and watched back what our mistakes were, and they were pretty simple mistakes. And then we just fixed it, talked about it, and we still felt very confident in those maps, so we decided to play them again and it was a lot better the second time around.

Can you clarify what happened in the 1v2 from twist on Nuke, where he defused the bomb on upper?

I think tarik got naded perhaps, so he didn't have any sound, so he didn't hear the defuse and then they were about to peek him.

There was a lot of yelling between you and Heroic, and I talked to cadiaN after that series and he was saying that he heard CeRq told you to stop yelling so much, that it was getting Heroic fired up. Was that the case?

No, I don't remember CeRq telling us that. We were always going to yell and hype ourselves up as much as we can, that's what we do now. I think we're just going to keep on doing it, we don't care if the other team yells, we're just going to keep doing what we do, and that's just hyping ourselves up.

You seemed to enjoy the banter part of it, as well, and you've been very loud in general, a lot louder compared to the previous version of the team in particular. Is that something you're doing consciously because of the quiet personalities on the team or did that just happen with you and tarik coming in?

I think it kind of just happened one day. We all talked about why we weren't as hyped as we should be during rounds and we felt like it could help us a lot more than it could harm us, so we just decided to start doing it a lot more. I think you can see the benefits of how it helps your mental game during the actual match, it just helps you stay positive during the whole game and keeps sending positive vibes.

There was a time earlier this year where NRG played a lot against fnatic when you weren't part of the team, but since then it hasn't happened with these two lineups. Both of you have gone on to secure a title upon changes, with one each from the last two big events, how do you think you stack up against them for the upper bracket final?

I think fnatic is probably the toughest opponent here right now. They're playing very good CS, they just formed their new team, so they're in that honeymoon period again, and they're coming off a win, obviously, so they're just firing on all cylinders. Hopefully, we just show up like we have been so far lately and it's going to be a good match.

How do you see your chances of going all the way here, with such a disparity between the previous two tournaments?

We're not too focused on winning just yet, we know we still have a few games left to play, so we're just going to keep on working on our mistakes and grinding it out because we still haven't been playing at our peak level. We're slowly getting back to it, but it's just going to take a bit more time.

Even after this convincing win against Renegades you feel like that wasn't your peak?

No, we still made a few mistakes that are pretty uncharacteristic so we're just going to keep working those out.