degster: "I just really want to play on the stage"

After winning a match that took over three-and-a-half hours to finish due to technical issues, a relieved Abdul "⁠degster⁠" Gasanov spoke to HLTV.org about the stressful start to the Major.

It's only day one at the IEM Rio Major, but OG have already gone through an ordeal. degster arrived in the Brazilian city a day later due to travel issues, before the Russian AWPer encountered technical problems during the team's first match against Grayhound, which led to a long delay.

Nonetheless, the European side breezed past the Australian opposition without breaking much of a sweat, heading into the second round with a win to their name before they play their second match later on the first day.

We got a hold of degster after the match and asked him about his stressful experiences in the past two days, as well as about the atmosphere in the Riocentro venue.

You had some big tech issues in your first game, can you tell me what happened there?

I will explain for everyone. I missed my first flight and I wasn't with my team yesterday, so when we set up, they did it without me, so today we came earlier than other teams. From the start, my monitor was crashing, I asked them to fix that, we unplugged cables, plug them in again, but it didn't help. They changed the cable. At the end of this road, they changed tree different PCs, two monitors, three cables, they even asked me to change the Steam account, they asked me to change my config, I changed it to my previous one, and nothing helped. We actually spoke with admins after we finished the game and they asked me, "so what did you change?" And I told them, "guys, I don't know, I didn't do anything, it just works."

But why didn't you come two days ago, what happened on your travels?

The problem was that my vaccine document doesn't say that I have two shots of vaccine, it just shows that I have one. People at the registration desk told me that I needed to show them an application and that I have two injections, but the first vaccine I did was in Cologne and I couldn't register for this application because it's only for German people. The second one I did in my country, and they only wrote the date when I got the second injection. I was trying to explain that, but they didn't believe me and they told me I couldn't go into the airplane.

This match against Grayhound took over 3.5 hours to finish, I saw you go back and forth all the time while they were resolving the issues - how stressful was the whole experience?

Actually, I think it was okay for me, but I saw some teammates were thinking, "guys, I hate waiting." I was trying to do my best and in the moments they gave me to go outside, drink some water, or go to the bathroom, I just said to myself not to be focused on the problems.

I know you played backstage, but you can hear a lot of the noise from the stage here. What do you think of the atmosphere, to go into the Major and have this from the start?

Bro, I really like it. The audience is the best you can have for me. Every single time when I go to a tournament, I really want to have a goal, for example at the BLAST tournament, to go to the semi-finals and see the audience. That's the best case scenario I have in this tournament. I just really want to play on the stage.

How much does it affect you even back here, how much could you hear when you were in the match?

It actually only affects you a bit, because you can only hear the screams, but you don't feel the stage and the vibrations. But in some rounds my teammates were saying, "woah, what is going on here?"

Talking about the first stage, how ready do you guys feel and what do you think of your chances to go through?

I would like to say that there's no chance not to go in. It's not about our confidence, we can only do one thing: To try to do our best to be there. That's it. I never put any other goals. I'm not saying "oh, we're playing against this team? We should always win against them." It's a Major and everyone here deserves to be here. The only thing you can do is do your job in the best way. Even if you do something with mistakes, as we speak with my team, we need to understand how we can fix that. That's the most important thing in my opinion.