jkaem on Liquid veto: "I was 100% sure it was not going to be Ancient"

Joakim "⁠jkaem⁠" Myrbostad gave some brief thoughts on Apeks' opening win over Liquid in Paris.

Apeks got off on the right foot at the BLAST.tv Paris Major Challengers Stage with a 16-12 victory over Liquid, closing out an early lead and denying a comeback from the North American side to go up 1-0 in the Swiss stage.

The European squad didn't expect to play Ancient against Nick "⁠nitr0⁠" Cannella's men, but weren't caught off guard on the map despite a change in positions from some of the Liquid players. jkaem shared some brief words on the matchup with HLTV after the game, and also touched on playing a second best-of-one later today.

Yesterday YEKINDAR said that Liquid were going to bring a new style. What did you think of it after this game?

I'm not sure actually. I was thinking more maybe he brought in this VP kind of playstyle. I know nitr0 back in the day played more structured I guess, but I didn't feel any different to be honest.

I was 100% sure it was not going to be Ancient, and when they let Ancient through then it was an easy decision for us to make, or actually they picked it over Overpass. And they also swapped a bunch of roles, so they have definitely been working; we have this paper with all the positions and not everything was accurate.

What did you think the map was going to be? Ancient was definitely a big surprise.

Between Liquid and us, there's many maps it could be. They definitely hoped for Mirage, we were going to remove that, we were going to remove Inferno, so we were down to... not 100%, but very sure it was going to be Overpass.

We saw that on their Overpass they've been pretty weak on T side, and since we had the high seed we would end up on Overpass and we would pick sides, and we would pick CT so that is probably why they didn't want to risk it. We knew Ancient and Anubis was small chance, but very likely it was going to be Overpass.

In the match itself, they almost had a bit of a comeback in the second half, but then you ended up closing it out. Can you walk me through that half and also going up early against them?

They were doing a good comeback for sure. I wouldn't even say we were playing sloppy or letting off the gas or whatever, I think we were playing our game but they just caught us off guard a couple of times. In the end, luckily for us we started so well that we had enough rounds to play with so we could just close it out, but yeah I mean it's not like they played awful.

For you coming in and beating them in this opening match, how do you feel now with one more match to play and not much time to prepare?

Honestly, preparation is not my job. I love the fact that we are playing more than one best-of-one a day, one best-of-one a day is kind of rough as a player. You do all this preparation, you dress up in full merch, you arrive to the arena before so long, you sit and setup, you warmup, and then you play one game? That would be kinda awful in my opinion, so I'm glad there is more games.