es3tag: "We got fired up because of something cadiaN said as we were going back into the booths"

Patrick "⁠es3tag⁠" Hansen discusses Ninjas in Pyjamas's BLAST Premier Fall Final-qualifying victory against HEROIC in our latest interview from Copenhagen.

Ninjas in Pyjamas became the latest team to ensure a spot at the BLAST Premier Fall Final through the last-chance stage. The Swedish-majority squad recovered after a shaky run through the groups, beating HEROIC in a three-map series to lock down their spot at the Royal Arena in late November.

We spoke to es3tag about the qualifying match and Ninjas in Pyjamas finally finding success on one of their signature maps, Overpass, after losing the previous two times on it to Evil Geniuses and Liquid.

The Dane explained why his team was more vocal than usual during the match against the famously loud Casper "⁠cadiaN⁠" Møller and walked us through the difficult first two maps, where HEROIC came back from two big deficits.

I noticed you guys got a little bit more into the shouting in this match. Did that have anything to do with Heroic specifically?

No, not specifically. Of course they're screaming, so you have give some back, but we got quite fired up because of something cadiaN said as we were going back into the booths. So we were like, "alright, now we're gonna give them hell."

Is that something that you can share?

No, no, I think that's best kept between us. It's just banter, but I thought it was funny and they got really fired up, we all got really fired up. Plus, when it's going really well, it's hard not to shout and be really hyped.

You were having a hard time closing out Inferno. What were the struggles going into the late stages of your CT side and finding a way to get those last two rounds in?

I think we were just giving away way too many picks. Heroic is a really solid team and if you give them the opportunity and give them the frags, in 5v4s they'll just outplay you with really good fakes and turning on the map. It's really hard to read them and we had to gamble quite a lot, and they would just search one up and be like "okay, they stacked here" and go to the other place. They also managed to kill us off a couple of times when were trying to save the weapons, which is always kinda demotivating when you're trying to save weapons and you just get smashed.

I think we've been our own Achille's heel when we've been playing Inferno CT side and we've been getting a bit too complacent, so we just need to play solid and continue as if we're really far behind instead of getting really complacent.

What happened on Mirage? You guys were up 8-3 and it fell apart from there.

That map just needs to be removed ASAP (scoffs).

No, but, for real, the map is quite random for us at the moment. Either we have a really good day and we just smash everything on the CT side and T side all of a sudden starts to work for us, but it does feel at times really random.

I did notice that they were pushing up for info in different places and they were able to stack and have fast flanks, so it was really hard for us on the T side when we lost entries and they were pushing B and had all the info and knew we were going A. Those types of rounds are really hard to do anything with, and if you're constantly getting screwed economy wise, it's just a really tough T side to have in general. But yeah, CT side we definitely could have had way more, we were kinda expecting 11 or 12 rounds after a 3v1 on B site and we had their money in shambles.

I don't recall exactly who said this, but it was something along the lines of you not losing three Overpasses in a row. You had those two losses to EG and Liquid earlier - what did you identify as the problems in those matches and how did you adapt for today, where it seemed fairly straightforward and comfortable this time?

The thing about Overpass, before coming into this tournament, in practice we were really confident on it. We were smashing every single team, there was one day where we didn't have our coach with us and we were just fooling around and we just 15-0'd a team on almost both sides (laughs).

It was looking really good on Overpass, and coming into this tournament Liquid's been looking a lot better than expected and EG, I don't know, they managed to just outplay us on their CT side as well. It's been rough especially because you don't really have time in between those days to review, but we had an off day yesterday and we just talked about it, looked at it, and practiced. It looked a lot better and we were actually really confident today, we were actually thinking to ourselves as well that no way we lose it three times when we pick it (laughs).