nafany: "I think we can try to close this year in the top two"

With a grand-final against Entropiq on the horizon, Vladislav "⁠nafany⁠" Gorshkov sat down with HLTV to talk about Gambit's year.

Gambit are the fairy-tale story that every young player dreams of. They were a inexperienced team grinding their way through the ranks, and through hard work and dedication they rose to the pinnacle of the CS:GO world.

Since reaching the heady heights of the number one spot in the HLTV world rankings, things haven't quite gone smoothly for the Russian squad. Still a member of the Counter-Strike elite, results have cooled off in the second part of 2021.

With a grand-final matchup against Entropiq awaiting Gambit on Sunday, IGL nafany sat down with HLTV to discuss his team's performance at V4, their run at the Major, and what they hope to achieve in the rest of the year.

You had a slow start to the event, dropping a map to Fiend, surviving a scare against eSuba and dropping a map to Enterprise. Why do you think that is?

There are a lot of things which make this result; first of all, we have a lot of dark horses at this tournament, for example eSuba and Enterprise. They are great teams and have good players, and it is obvious that they can put up a big fight with us, this is the main reason I guess.

The other reason is that we were not in the best shape after the Major I will say, but I feel like now we are really confident in our map pool and we can beat every team right now. Also we need to understand that we are here to gain more experience on LAN, because we are a very young team, as far as I remember we were the second youngest at the Major after GODSENT. That’s why we are here and trying to gain more experience.

Is that maybe why you have gotten better as the tournament has gone on, you are feeling more comfortable with each day?

For sure, for sure. We need to understand that in this tournament we have different monitors etc., so that is also a reason why we were playing not so confident. Now it is okay for us, as we can see; we played a good Dust2 versus BIG. They didn’t play well on Ancient as we know, but we have what we have.

Talking more about Dust2, you lost twice on that map earlier in the tournament, what turned it around for you so you could beat BIG here?

We just made some fixes on this map, also we must understand that we are working with our coaches and they help us a lot to understand this map better. I surely can say that our coaches really like Dust2 because it is an old school map, and they understand it really well, so we are feeling confident on this map.

Looking forward to the grand-final, you will be facing off against either Fiend or Entropiq, so how are you feeling about these teams?

To be honest, I don’t really like to speak about other teams. Every team at this event is good, and we expect anyone to be able to get to the final. We didn’t take in mind who could beat each other, we will see who wins and we will prepare for them, that is all.

Did you come into this event expecting to win it?

Our main goal is to gain as much experience as we can, maybe even earlier we should have come out of the group in second place to play a few more matches, who knows (smiles). As I said, our main goal is to gain more experience. Everyone, of course, expects from us at least the final and probably to win the tournament, but we do not think about it all because we don’t need this pressure. We are just trying to play games and have some fun.

If I could ask about your performance at the Major, how did you feel about making top-four in Stockholm?

It’s a good result for us, not the best because if we maybe didn’t fail in the group we would be in the other bracket to NAVI and maybe get a final. They deserved it, we did not have as much experience, it was our first Major for four players and it’s an insane result for us. If someone said to us one year ago that we would be top-four in a Major, we would say “okay, it’s an insane result!”. We have what we have and we will continue our work.

NAVI won that series fairly comfortably, why do you think that was?

Let’s say, first of all, they were better as a team at this tournament, it’s obvious. Also we need to understand that we weren’t experienced at all, we have four young players and the only experienced player was Hobbit. They have at least two very experienced players, and the other guys have some experience except B1t, I guess that’s the main reason we lost. Our matches versus NAVI are always like, they win one game, and we win the next game. We got good experience from this game.

Looking at your year as a whole, you started off in great form and were the number one team in the world, but since Cologne you haven’t been as dominant. What happened?

To be honest, we said in previous interviews that we will probably have some struggles at LAN because we are not experienced at all, so that’s the main reason why we are not number one now. I think we can try to close this year in the top two, I think we can do it, it’s our main goal right now.

To consider the rest of the year, you have IEM Winter and BLAST Premier Global Finals left to play, are you looking to win these events?

We never have goals like winning the tournament, we try to do our best and we see what we can do. I believe we can win both tournaments, but I can’t say that we will for sure win this, I don’t take that in mind, I am just playing the game and that is all.

As for next year, do you think you can take back the number one spot?

Of course we are trying to take that spot, but as I said, I never make solid predictions. We are trying to take each tournament as it comes.