npl: "I understand B1ad3 and electronic's ideas better than I did before"

Natus Vincere's youngster was a standout for his team in their clean qualifying run at the RMR.

Andrii "⁠npl⁠" Kukharskyi put forth a performance unseen from him before at the BLAST.tv Paris Major Europe RMR A, helping power his team to a clean 3-0 qualification for the final CS:GO Major and the first one the 17-year-old will be a part of.

The youngster took some time after his final performance, a 2-0 victory over direct rivals FaZe, in which he was the highest-rated player with a 1.35 rating, to talk about his uptick in form and his team's securing of a Legends Stage spot at the Valve-sanctioned event in Paris.

So, the first thing I want to do is talk about your individual performance here. You really stepped up, and you've been playing at a level that we haven't seen from you before. What's the key to this success?

I don't know. I think I managed to do less mistakes than I did before in previous tournaments, and maybe that's it. And of course, the ideas which B1ad3 and electronic want to tell me, I understand them better than I did before.

So you think it's just experience, time, and kind of learning how to play within this system?

Yes, but there's still a lot of work to do because I still managed to do some stupid mistakes. And sometimes you don't see it because the observer is not showing it, but I see it myself that I'm still making a lot of mistakes and a lot of stupid mistakes. So it's still my main goal to try and make them less. And of course, playing in tier one compared to tier two or three is harder.

So tell me, you guys went 3-0 here and qualified for the Major. Your teammates have plenty of experience, but it's going to be your first one. How excited are you about that?

I'm very excited. I don't know, maybe that's all. I'm very excited. I don't know what to tell. I'm very hyped right now.

You didn't need to go to a third map, but Vertigo was in the veto of the match you just played. It's a map that this team never plays, so what was that about?

We don't have a lot of official matches. I mean, we have only one there [on Vertigo], and without me. But I wasn't scared of Vertigo. Maybe my teammates were a bit, but I fully felt like I was going to play good there.

Before you guys came here, obviously you were favorites to go through, as was FaZe, the team you just beat. But I wasn't really sure how it would go, especially after that first match against Into the Breach when they took you all the way to overtime. How does it feel going 3-0 now? And looking back and saying, 'Okay, we made it, we didn't lose a single match'? Were you guys that confident that you could do it as cleanly as you did, especially after that first overtime match?

Yes, of course. We were very calm when we played that Inferno, we weren't nervous. TeamSpeak was fully calm. We knew that we were going to win this game. Of course, there were some shaky moments, but it's first game, so of course it's random. And the second game we won easily, and third game because of the system we played against FaZe, which was a bit strange. I don't know how we can play against FaZe if we are the two favorites. So it's really strange. But yes, we made it 3-0, I was very confident about it.

NAVI is kind of always expected to be fighting for titles, fighting for every championship that you guys play in. And the last couple of Big Events you had semi-final exits. Now going into the Major, when every team wants to kind of hit their best level, their peak, do you think you're headed in the right direction to have a good Major?

Yes, I think that's it. We are headed in the right direction for the last Major and me especially, I'll try my best to win it and my teammates also because it's the last Major for them and they also want to win it. So we have a lot of motivation.

Your first Major is the last CS:GO Major. Does that have any particular importance for you?

Of course, because it's my last chance to win it and we'll see. I don't want to say some big words, but we are trying our best.

Going through 3-0, how important was it to get that Legend stage? Was that something that you guys really felt like you had to get, you had to get the top seed?

I wasn't thinking about that and I didn't hear that anyone was talking about that also, so maybe we just needed to qualify there. We just needed to qualify, that's it.

To kind of close things out, you told me that your showing here was just a result of growing and getting used to tier one and getting used to the team, talking to electronic, talking to B1ad3, learning from them and fixing mistakes. But tactically, were there any kind of changes made before you came to the RMR?

We always try to play new rounds and we managed to find new tactics because in tier one you have to always change something because your enemy is watching a lot of demos and they prepare for you, so you have to change a lot of tactics. And sometimes it's hard for you, sometimes it's easy, but you have to do it because it's tier-one CS.

Do you think that helped you a little bit also to feel more comfortable in the team?

The first time it was hard for me because I'm in my previous team, we just learned a round and we can play it maybe for three months or something like this. And here, we can play one round, and you have to change like 50% of it, and then you just delete this round. You have new ones, so it's hard, but that's part of your work.