YEKINDAR: "We always believed in ourselves, even when we started 0-2"

"We're not getting overconfident, but we have our own confidence to win games," YEKINDAR says.

Liquid look like a team on a mission having gone up to the 2-0 pool in the first day of the BLAST.tv Paris Major's Legends Stage. From an 0-2 start in the Challengers Stage, the North American side is now just one best-of-three victory away from qualifying for the playoffs after taking out 9INE and Natus Vincere in two very convincing displays.

After the perfect start in the Legends Stage, in which Liquid didn't give up double digits in either of their wins, Mareks "⁠YEKINDAR⁠" Gaļinskis — who dismantled NAVI with a 2.00 rating — took some time to answer questions about Liquid's clean start, their victory over Natus Vincere, and what it took to get the team rolling after a slow first day in the tournament's previous stage.

Tell me about this new strat that you guys have, which I guess you call: Mareks, go kill.

[Laughs]

And then you just say, 'OK.'

I felt good, I got all of the openings. In my head, everything I was thinking, that was actually happening, and it was just a really good game in terms of communication in the team. It was easy to understand what was happening on the map, that's why it was easy to know when you have to go and where you have to go, where to find space and where not, or 'Can they be there? Or are they not there?' So, props to the team. Today I ate chicken with fried rice, so maybe that's it — I don't know. [Laughs]

On a more serious note, I was watching the match with Hooch and we were discussing a bit where could have NAVI's gameplan gone wrong. When you look at Liquid you see that you [YEKINDAR] have the capability of having these crazy entries, multi-kills, opening sites on your own...

There's kind of two ways to go about it, they change their plan a bit to make it annoying by throwing nades and making it uncomfortable, or they try and play regularly and see if you can be stopped like that. Today, they couldn't. Should they have adapted more to Liquid's abilities with you finding all of these openings, or do they try to play normal and fail that way?

They have their own gameplan in their head, their own things they believe in and what's going to help them win. Every team is different, some teams like to try and break the enemy's momentum, other teams are more comfortable playing with backup and rotating at the right time and punishing executes or whatever. I believe they were trying different things, but at the same time we were doing things to counter that.

It's really hard, when you're getting snowballed, all of the things you can do to stop the snowball, the enemies also understand that you could be doing that. Overall, I believe that if they would have won one round it could have gone worse for us, but because of insane clutches and really good communication and individual skill from our players, we didn't give them the chance. Any other day they could have won by getting one buy round and then start rolling. That's everything that a team usually needs, but they just didn't get that one buy round.

At the beginning of the Challengers Stage, at this very moment, you were 0-2. You looked like ghosts and barely beat Fluxo on the second day, there was a kind of somber atmosphere. Now you're in the Legends Stage, 2-0, and you beat NAVI with an incredible display. Tell me about the difference between then and now.

When we started 0-2 we rewatched the games against Apeks and FORZE and we just saw like 15 mistakes. Crazy mistakes! Mistakes that shouldn't happen at the Major. When you see those mistakes, you're asking, 'Why am I doing this?' Or 'What's the reason?' Then you start losing confidence and slowly start crawling back with the three-mapper against Fluxo. Then you get the confidence back, you beat Complexity, you beat Grayhound, and come warmed up here.

Instantly it's a lot easier when you have the confidence, when you understand the reason you were losing. Now everybody understands their role, what they need to do... How communication is important, how not giving entries is important, how valuing your in-game life is important. That's why you can see a really good performance from us and that's what I always said, if we don't make mistakes we can beat any team in the world. Obviously 2-0 is not qualifying, we still need to win one game and we could be a team that loses 2-3, who knows. We're not getting overconfident, but we have our own confidence to win games.

There's things that people will say, like never put a team 0-3 in the pick 'ems if they come from Challengers Stage even if you think they're a bad team. Or teams that come to the Legends will struggle more against teams that come from Challengers because those teams have already warmed up. So how important was it for you to get that warmup, get those games in, to be in this environment a little bit?

You can feel it now, I believe that everybody on my team can feel it after those five games we played in Challengers. You are already used to going to the matches in the studio, taking the shuttle, setting up here. It helps a lot. You could feel that in both games, against 9INE and NAVI, and I'm not saying that it's not necessarily because they didn't play before, but it could be one of the reasons. It's just a head start, but also if you lose 0-3 it's not a head start, you know? [Laughs]

You've really swung it around from those first days, you found your stride, you can really see it with a game like this against a top team in the world. It must do wonders for the confidence and the atmosphere in the team. How much do you believe in yourselves now compared to when the tournament started?

We always believed in ourselves, even when we started 0-2, we were mad at ourselves because we know what we're capable of. For us, if we didn't believe in ourselves, we wouldn't be working our asses off after starting 0-2. Trying to improve and fix all of those mistakes, thinking about how to be better and go deeper. But we believe in ourselves, we always knew that if everything aligns and everyone plays on point we can beat any team. We definitely believe in ourselves and this is a great example not only for us, but for all of the teams.

What has the behind the scenes work of Liquid been like, what have you been workshopping and trying to figure out to get into this good form you're starting to find?

When we lost the first two games we rewatched the games, we saw a lot of problems, a lot of mistakes, and we asked ourselves: What's the problem, why are we playing like this, why were we playing differently in the bootcamp?

We got all of the thoughts from all of the players, from management, everybody, and we understood approximately what the difference between the bootcamp and here was, and what we can improve now or what we can't improve. Is it a problem of macro? Or is it a problem of focus? That was a really long talk about understanding what was going wrong and I think we found the right path. Maybe it's not the right path, but if you believe in it it's going to help you a lot to succeed and become better.