NBK-: "Every time we took a timeout it was just to say 'stay calm, stay calm, just do what we do in practice, don't complicate things'"

We chatted with Nathan "⁠NBK-⁠" Schmitt after OG's marathon win against Evil Geniuses in their opening BLAST Premier Spring Series 2020 to hear his thoughts on the match against the North American squad as well as their upcoming bout against G2.

OG are playing their second event of the season in London after kicking the year off at ICE Challenge, where they went out in 5-6th place with a win against ENCE and losses to Natus Vincere and MAD Lions. After a week-long bootcamp in London, where they stayed after their ICE Challenge exit, OG showed staying power on Friday night when they won a three-map series against Evil Geniuses that saw the first two maps go to thirty rounds and the decider end in overtime.

NBK- shared some thoughts regarding some confusion in the team's communications, one of their big hurdles to jump at the moment, and how taking timeouts just to calm everybody down and re-focus was crucial to their Dust2 comeback against Evil Geniuses. The Frenchman also talked about looking forward to tonight's match against G2 and that he sees his team as capable as any when they play at their full potential, comparing them to Complexity in their Group B run last week.

You went into the first day of play as underdogs against Evil Geniuses, and Brehze himself said that any team that was going to beat them would have a hard time doing so. You did have a hard time, but you also eventually won the match. How did you pull it off against such a confident team?

This goes for a lot of teams, but having too much confidence could be bad when they play an underdog because we had everything to win and for them it's a lose-lose situation—if they win it's just normal but if they lose it's an upset. Our main goal was just to win, regardless of the result, but as people saw it was a very, very tough best-of-three.

Indeed, two thirty-round maps and overtime in the decider, but what was particularly impressive was how you brought it back from an 8-14 deficit. There was a pause right before the comeback, what did you talk through to get back on track?

Right now the main problem we have as a team and a group is that it can get really chaotic and that chaos puts us in a really bad spot because we miss a lot of things. Our communication becomes bad and we don't actually listen to each other, so frustration comes in when you mix all of that up. The key for us is to find a balance where we can get rid of the negative things and just focus on playing properly and being 100% into it.

Every time we took a timeout it was just to say "stay calm, stay calm, just do what we do in practice, don't complicate things." It's something I'm taking care of, mainly, because I'm a calm person and I have the experience to analyze that in the game. That's what I try to bring to the group. We have insane soldiers, valde played an insane game, and everyone popped off when needed, but yeah, that's the main thing we do during timeouts, just calming the mood and the spirits to focus on what we need to do.

We saw valde struggle a bit at ICE Challenge, but he showed up against Evil Geniuses and had a great match. Did you make some changes during your bootcamp?

We changed a position on Nuke and we changed a bit here or there. Nothing too crazy, the main thing is that there's less confusion regarding how we approach everything. We had a lot of talks during the bootcamp period, we didn't play that many maps, but we talked a lot to be on the same page and move forward from there. valde was a big part of those talks because he needed things to be straightened out, so coming into BLAST Premier, which is our big objective right now, it's just a matter of keeping things calm, simple, and clear for everyone. As long as we have clarity in the group, we're going to get headshots.

After his match yesterday, before watching you, nexa commented that he wanted to play EG because he thought they were the better team. Anything to say about that?

He has a point because it's always good to be the underdog, right? Being the favorite, unless you're a dominant team that has everything under control, it won't help you. I completely understand him, it's pretty normal and fair, and EG are the better team out of the two of us. I also think they're a bit scared of the unknown because we haven't shown too much, although we took a map off of them at summit a couple of months ago. It's going to be fun, I always like playing Kenny, I know him very well and we're very friendly and all of that, so it'll add some fun to the game. But yeah, nothing special, I think the statement is fair and it'll be a matter of who can punch the hardest.

You went out to MAD Lions at ICE Challenge. What was it you expected from this BLAST Premier group stage?

It's a bit mixed. When we played MAD Lions we felt on the same level or better than them, which didn't help with our communication and we got chaotic and frustrated and all of the things I spoke about earlier, so the main thing for us after that game was to fix those problems, which we did for the most part during the bootcamp. We can expect passing groups because we know that playing our A-game we can beat anyone, kind of like what Complexity did in Group B. That's what we have to do, bring our A-game, and then we can work on our B and C-game to make sure that's also fine. But if we bring our A-game we can beat anyone, like we did against EG. We hope to pass groups, if we can win we'll take it, it's cool, but realistically top 2 is great and then we can focus on the Minor qualifier and all of that.

So when you talk about the chaos in your communication, how do you actually go about fixing that? You noticed it at ICE, you said it was a bit of a problem here until you took the pauses to straighten it out. What are some of the techniques you're using?

There are a lot of issues surrounding inexperience. We're an international team and we have never been in this situation, especially Aleksi having to lead and all of that. There's some inexperience regarding Counter-Strike directly, which doesn't really matter so much, but it can create some confusion, so to fix that what we need is to have a clear voice, or clear voices, because players have a lot of ideas on this team. The problem is that when you have too many ideas it gets chaotic and when you play Counter-Strike you have to be 100% into something, so what we want to do is clarify everything.

Aleksi is leading us through everything and when a mid-round call is made we follow the mid-round call, period. That clarity helps us put one foot in front of the other. After that we can advance, once we have the basics, and go one step further. So that's the plan, first keep it calm and clean and then add more initiatives and random things, but before anything we have to get used to reproducing what we do in practice and not stray too much from that.

You said it was going to be fun playing Kenny, how it'll add a bit of spice, but what do you expect from G2? I'm sure you've been watching their progression, do you think you have good chances of getting a win?

We're pretty similar, but I think the main difference between our teams lies in the amount of time we've had as a group. They've had more time to polish things than us, we're a bit more "brawly" at times. They have heavy hitters, we have heavy hitters, maybe we have a little bit more experience than they do to adapt, but it's going to be a matter of doing things properly for us. They have players that can turn rounds around, so we just need to be careful against them and not give them openings. If we can develop our game I'm pretty confident that it'll go well.