device: "I'm definitely not feeling in my best shape, but I'm happy as long as we are winning"

We caught up with Nicolai "⁠device⁠" Reedtz after Astralis made it through to the grand final with a convincing victory over Ninjas in Pyjamas.

The Danes are now waiting for their opponent in the grand final after taking down Ninjas in Pyjamas in a two-map series, which saw the Swedes put up a solid fight on Train but eventually concede the best-of-three after a convincing affair on Nuke.

After the match, we got a chance to speak to device, who commented on the first half of Train not going according to Astralis' plan before reflecting on his form and some below-standard performances as of late.

Running through the final, it ended up being quite convincing even though there was a point on Train where NiP put up a good fight, did the series go according to plan?

We started out really well on Train and we felt like we had the money control and everything, so we were pretty surprised when they got seven rounds. It didn't really go according to plan, I think you always want around 10 rounds on the CT side. Overall, we felt like we were in control, but they had some great pushes, Plopski had a round where he just pushed pop and caught us off-guard, same with f0rest on Nuke in some of the rounds. So yeah, I think they tried to play very explosively and tried to catch us off-guard, they know we are a slow team that like to take control before we do anything, so it felt like that was their game plan and we just adapted after that, started playing more slowly and it worked out.

People have taken notice of some of your underwhelming performances lately, mainly on Train back at EPL against mouz that even gla1ve mentioned as something you're not used to, and there were also some slow starts from you here in Bahrain. Are we reading too much into it or are you not feeling in your best shape?

Oh, I'm definitely not feeling in my best shape. I think that it's the end of the season, it's been tough on the mind and the body recently, so I'm just trying to put as much energy as I've got into it. I just haven't put that much work into the individual game, and, as gla1ve said on the Train game, if I just hit one or two shots we probably would have won that.

I don't really think too much about it, as long as we are winning then I'm happy. You can always improve individually but it's so hard at the end of the year to have that strength and energy and to just push through, so I'm just trying my best, honestly.

You're through to the final without anyone being eliminated at the moment. Do you as almost everyone else expect Liquid to join you there?

Yeah, I guess Liquid. In my opinion, they are better than the two other teams, so yeah, I 100% expect Liquid and I expect them to pick Vertigo in the final because it didn't work out for them on Inferno. Yeah, Liquid, and they'll probably change up the veto.

How much of that opening win do you attribute to dupreeh and his performance, though, could it have gone the other way without it?

Oh yeah, for sure. It's the game, right, sometimes some people just carry the game. I think he carried a lot of the slack, of course there were opening frags all around the team, but yeah, if you have a guy dropping 62 in two maps he's doing something that doesn't happen often. Of course, it meant a lot to us that he did that and it meant that we got a good start here. We're not a team that plays too much off individual performances, so I'm sure we could have clinched it without that, but he made it a lot easier, of course.