flamie: "It's not easy to jump from tier two to tier one, but Perfecto is playing so well"

Na`Vi survived day three of IEM Katowice and we interviewed Egor "⁠flamie⁠" Vasilyev to discuss the team's progress with Ilya "⁠Perfecto⁠" Zalutskiy and their comebacks in Poland.

Natus Vincere are now one victory away from qualification for the playoffs after playing three series at IEM Katowice so far, beating FaZe in the opening match before losing to fnatic to drop down to the lower bracket, where they eliminated Ninjas in Pyjamas.

On the way to the lower bracket final, flamie & co. came back from significant deficits on three separate maps facing FaZe and fnatic, with the Russian attributing that to the work of their psychologist in our next interview from Katowice, in which he also discussed Na`Vi's impressive progress with Perfecto.

You won your BLAST group and are doing well here so far, how are you managing to improve this quickly with Perfecto?

I think we only had nine days of practice or even less before BLAST, but when a new player comes it's always a new motivation and new goals for the team. We discussed that even though we don't have so many strats and stuff like that, we can play old ones, or we can improvise during the game. Right now, not everything works because teams can adapt to our playstyle, but I think we're doing a great job now and improving game by game.

What do you make of how Perfecto is handling himself?

In the beginning, I think it was a little bit hard for him because he changed a lot of positions. For me, it was a bit hard, as well, because I changed almost all my roles on CT sides and got some new roles with the second AWP again, and I'm starting to grind from zero. I think Perfecto is playing really well considering how much time he has played with us, it's not easy to jump from the tier two to tier one, but he's playing so well, winning a lot of clutches and not being afraid of anyone. I'm really happy that he's our teammate.

You pulled off some pretty big comebacks here, from down 0-6 and 9-13 on two maps against FaZe and once more against fnatic, what do you attribute that to?

I would attribute that to our psychologist because he's working with us a lot and he teaches us to understand that you can win the game from any score, you can make a comeback, if you played a bad first half you should recover mentally and play better in the second half. CS now is very interesting, everyone is making comebacks. If you, for example, play a bad T side, you take some SGs on the CT side and you can make a comeback. You just need to believe, take the pistol round, the first gunround, and you can snowball.

On the other hand, you also dropped a 10-5 lead on Mirage against fnatic, how come you weren't able to get going on the Terrorist side?

I think the problem is with our map pool a little bit. On T side of Mirage, we're not playing a lot of new stuff, they knew what we were going to do and we didn't play well. I think fnatic played really well on the CT side of Mirage and they just played better. We lost some focus after the first half, we were maybe a bit overconfident, maybe that's why. I don't know.

You mentioned how short on time you've been with Perfecto, but you've always been a team to set high goals, what are they here?

Our team is always setting the highest goals at the tournaments, to win or at least to play in the final. Yeah, we didn't play that much with Perfecto, but we won the BLAST group, we won against Astralis, we showed that we can play well against good teams. Of course, sometimes we need more time, but I think now our goal is just to play better and maybe pass the group stage, quarter-final, semi-final, step by step. There is no big goal to win now, but the goal is to play as much as we can and as well as we can.

To go a bit off track, Na`Vi were one of the teams to partner up with ESL recently, what was behind that decision?

We always go to ESL tournaments and we have a good relationship with them, we know how they do the tournaments, everyone does, so I think all the best teams decided which league we should play and that's why we play ESL.