Grim: "I don't feel shaken at all, we know we can play way better"

Complexity's star rifler remains hopeful as his team enter the 1-2 pool.

Complexity fell flat on day two of the BLAST.tv Paris Major Challengers Stage, capitulating entirely to paiN in a 4-16 loss on Nuke to get cast down to the 1-2 pool.

The North American side had an up-and-down day one as well, starting off on the right foot with a blowout first half against GamerLegion before eventually converting that into victory, only to be completely dismantled by Ilya "⁠m0NESY⁠" Osipov in their ensuing match.

HLTV spoke to Michael "⁠Grim⁠" Wince after Complexity's loss to paiN to get some insight into what went wrong in the match, as well as to see where the team's headspace is after going down into the 1-2 elimination pool.

A rough loss against paiN, tell me a little about that match as obviously, not much to talk about in terms of performance from your guys' end.

Yeah I don't know, it felt like we were a bit sloppy in the late rounds, we weren't tightening up as much as we should. skullz just 4k'd at door one round and we didn't trade him, I was flanking from heaven or something, and then there were just a few more rounds we were making sloppy mistakes in the mid to late round. I think the early rounds are fine but we just need to tighten up more in the late round for sure.

Bit of a recurring issue as well, both in terms of closing out leads but also in closing out rounds. Even yesterday you had a pretty substantial lead against GamerLegion that got closer towards the end. Can you give me some insight into what's going in with some of those late rounds, why you're struggling?

I'd say against GamerLegion it was more the early rounds because we were down 4vs5 or 3vs5 pretty early, literally from 10 or 15 seconds into the round. Today the late rounds, seeing who has what nades or who has the low HP to go first, stuff like that that we need to tighten up more and make sure it's more clean in the late rounds.

Do you have any insight into why you struggle in some of these games when you do get a lead?

Honestly I have no idea, it's just something we all have to figure out as a team because it's not just one individual, it's on all five, even six of us to figure out what the problem is and fix it. Right now I don't really know, I have to look back and see what's going on.

You ended up playing the same map against paiN as you did at the RMR, what went into the decision-making for that?

We knew we'd probably play Nuke again. We knew that in the last game in the RMR we made a bunch of sloppy mistakes, so we thought that this time we would not make the same mistakes we did that time. I'd say this time it was definitely more mistakes because we started CT side against paiN last time, and we talked mainly about the mistakes on our CT side.

We were honestly confident with the map, and I'm sure if we played them again we'd go with the same map, we're confident on the map but we just need to play better and up to our standards.

Speaking of some of those mistakes, there were some pretty consistent gaps in your T side smoke wall outside. Is that something that just slipped past you in practice, or was it something that was just happening in this game and not in practice?

I don't really know about that, because we've thrown that smoke wall a lot in practice and we've never died like that before, so maybe it's something that they found that other teams weren't abusing, or something to look at as maybe we're throwing the smoke the wrong way, but in practice that wasn't happening.

We picked up on it pretty early that they were one-waying it, so we had counters in mind if that happened again if we threw the same smoke and there was still a gap in it. Honestly, I'd say we definitely got caught off by it the first time, and the second time we were looking at it but we couldn't see him in the one-way, I tried spamming him. But yeah, I would say that is a new issue that I haven't seen before because that just hasn't been coming up in practice really.

You're 1-2 now, it's going to be best-of-threes from here on out. Does that offer you a little more comfort, that you're not stuck into best-of-ones?

I'd say so. Best-of-ones are always dangerous, anyone can beat anyone. Pistol rounds are very important in best-of-ones, especially the force-buys and anti-ecos. I think we won the CT pistol and then lost the next round, which completely screws our money up cause we have to force and then save again if we don't win that round.

I think the best-of-threes definitely provide more of a cushion or a comfort zone for us, but that's every team in general, everyone prefers best-of-threes. We've just got to really focus up and see what we can do now.

Given your start to the event, even if best-of-threes give you more confidence, do you feel shaken at all or is it something you think you can just talk about and bounce back from?

I don't really feel shaken at all because we know we can play way better than that. I just think that especially in best-of-threes, doesn't matter who we play, we really just need to focus on what we're doing and our mistakes, stuff like that.

It doesn't really matter who we play at the end of the day, if we don't play up to our level anyone can beat us, so we need to make sure that we can focus up and make sure that the mistakes that happened today don't happen in the next game. When we're actually playing up to standard we're a really strong team, and we just need to make sure or figure out how to get that more consistent.