kaze: "We'll make sure to play with the crowd's energy"

The atmosphere in TYLOO is "quite hyped" as the team prepares to play in its home tournament.

TYLOO have been Asia's top dogs for much of their history, but the organization has not found the same success in recent times. Their last project, an English-speaking roster led by Luka "⁠emi⁠" Vuković, failed to bring TYLOO back onto the international scene.

That prompted the organization to return to its Chinese roots and snap up the 5yclone roster that has been making waves in the Asian scene. The team qualified for the CS Asia Championships 2023 under the previous name and is now set to represent TYLOO in Shanghai.

Date	Matches
CS Asia Championships 2023
08/11/2023	ENCE 05:15 TYLOO	Match

Ahead of their opening match against ENCE, Andrew "⁠kaze⁠" Khong sat down with HLTV to discuss his feelings about joining TYLOO, the current outlook of the Asian scene, and his team's expectations for the tournament.

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We're here on the media day for CAC. hosted in China, a big event for TYLOO. What are the feelings for the team going into this event?

I would say the atmosphere of our team for this event is quite hyped because this is the first big LAN event in China after so many years since COVID hit. At least three years I would say that there's not many LANs in Asia, so it's exciting to have a LAN now.

Yesterday you played the IEM China closed qualifier, which you ended up losing. It was a hard loss, you were up on the last map and ended up losing to a comeback, just tell me about the feelings of that loss just before coming into this event, did that affect you at all?

Definitely a tough loss for that, because we were in a match-point lead. It was 12-8, we needed that win so badly. As usual, the loss is quite tough, but we managed to learn from the mistakes and see what we did wrong to not win that match. It's definitely not a bad situation, but we still learn from the mistake.

Talk to me about the move to TYLOO and how that's been after leaving Rare Atom.

TYLOO is a very legendary org for China because they've been dominating the Asian scene since 1.6.

Playing under them is quite a weird feeling because in 2020, in ViCi Gaming, our rival was TYLOO. Playing under them feels weird but we're still playing under a big name, so it's quite good to represent TYLOO.

Back then you had that rivalry with TYLOO, now in TYLOO you have a rivalry with Lynn Vision. They beat you in the IEM China qualifier and it's a bit of a back-and-forth with you two competing to be the best team in China. Can you tell me about that rivalry?

Yeah, now our rivalry is with Lynn Vision. Back then, there was not many Chinese teams I would say, it was only us, ViCi Gaming, and TYLOO. Right now it's LVG, and they are improving a lot right now. They are improving day by day, they're getting stronger, and I would say they are the top team right now.

Talking about TYLOO's progress and this team's progress in general, how has it been growing as a team in Europe, getting more practice in Europe and being able to bring it back here and play in China?

Our progress is going quite well. Recently the new game has been released, everyone has been putting more effort into CS2, grinding more time, and learning about the game. You have to change a lot of things, every strat you need to change the smokes because of the new smokes, so we're also improving day by day.

Recently we won the ESL Challenger Jönköping qualifier against TheMongolz, so I would say we've been progressing quite well.

Going into your first match in this event, three teams from each group are able to qualify for the playoffs and play in the arena. How do you feel going into the games here?

You just need to win one match to qualify to the playoffs, but our opponents are quite tough.

The first match is against ENCE, they are really quite a good team, their in-game leader Snappi and the rest of his mates. It's kind of tough to beat them, but mostly we'll try our best to make it to the playoffs at least. It's also in front of a crowd, so we'll make sure to play with the crowd's energy.