kuben: "I was surprised by how good we were from the start"

kuben discusses ENCE's "lucky" victory against Astralis, their group stage qualifying comeback against TheMongolz, and the atmosphere in the new roster.

ENCE have advanced to the IEM Katowice group stage after recovering from a loss to BIG in the Play-in stage. The Polish-majority side stunned Astralis on day two of the event to send them packing, and then survived a tough affair against The MongolZ to secure their spot further.

Following their qualification, a visibly drained Jakub "⁠kuben⁠" Gurczyński spoke to HLTV in a video interview about why he believed ENCE were "lucky" in their victory against the Danes and shared how the new roster is meshing together so far.

The coach admitted he had been surprised how good the team was from the get-go and spoke about Lukas "⁠gla1ve⁠" Rossander being surrounded by five Poles — six, counting the analyst, Maks "⁠trochu⁠" Trocha — and how he is making sure this doesn't become an issue.

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kuben, congratulations on making it through to the group stage at IEM Katowice. You seem pretty tired after that game.

That's true. I think I lost a lot of energy yesterday. I knew the game [against Astralis] yesterday required more hype from me for the guys. I know they've never won against Astralis, they've never played them on LAN, and I knew I must be the guy who is hyping them up and motivating them as much as I could. I even asked them before the game, are they going to scream, and they said, 'Ah, maybe...' So I knew I had to be the one.

I don't usually do that, but yeah, let's say I have my own rivalry with them for quite a long time. I remember the time in Apeks in IEM Cologne last year, we were winning the third map on Ancient against them and device was waving to us when the result went away. I wanted to wave to them this time, but I respect him a lot, he's a great player, I just said, 'I'm not gonna do that.' I respect them, who they are and how much they achieved. This time we were better.

I watched the game yesterday, the replay, and I would say yes, we played better, but we were so lucky in so many rounds. It's just impressive how many smokes we missed. There was one round that even Janko asked gla1ve at the desk, like, 'Was this on purpose?' what we did with all the HEs to Elbow as CT on Ancient. We just missed the smoke accidentally, the reason they went into Elbow, we naded them once, naded them twice and killed two. It was just so many random things, seriously, I could record like a 10-minute clip of random things in this game which worked in our favor.

And today... As a coach I have different approaches sometimes, and today I wanted them to feel that they are doing that by themselves, that they would perform. That it's not like the coach helping them or Lukas [gla1ve] carrying them. I wanted all of them to take responsibility for the final result and contribute equally to the final result and qualifying for the main event. Now, they know they are capable of it and I can help them in the moments where they really need me more.

Tell me about this Mirage comeback, it was 9-3 and then 11-5 in favor of TheMongolz.

I don't want to be praised for the game because it was the players coming back and shooting good headshots and having good reads, but I think it was 11-6 we were down, I just said, we have a 2K buy, but we just have to gamble at some point, we cannot let them have 12 rounds and just do eco. I called something which I should not disclose, but it worked well again and finally we came back, we even had this lead, 12-11, almost a fake comeback, but eventually we won in overtime. I was so happy because it could have been harder if we lost Mirage, and then Nuke didn't go our way.

I talked to gla1ve yesterday and he was saying there are still a lot of things you have to work on. You've only had this month together, so how are you feeling with the team?

Being fully honest, I was surprised by how good we were from the start. I wasn't expecting us to play as good, especially for three of the Polish players this is the first time they're playing international teams - I'm sorry, not for hades, but he's been playing for Polish teams for some time already.

The two newcomers into the international team are actually speaking English almost all the time, even when we are among Polish people, and I really like it. This is not only for a month, three months, a year or something, but they want to play in international teams in their further teams. I really like it because they took it serious. I'm not sure if it is me and Lukas, they know that experienced players are here and Paweł [dycha] as the best Polish player for many years.

We were praccing quite a lot, more than I actually wanted because I never put quantity over quality. I think we just need more theory time because we played a lot of praccs, we had good results at the praccs, but not often enough time for reflection, for summary of the things we did and just correcting all the mistakes.

I'm still passionate about CS and I like to talk all the time, so even on the side or during the evenings when we watch replays, I'm just giving them tips on how we should react and play, also praising them for the positive things they do because they are not heavily inexperienced, they're just maybe a bit tactically underdeveloped and maybe lacked some confidence. They are really shooting hard, but I want to reach their ceiling point a bit higher than they think they've already reached.

The criticism goes kind of like, what are five Polish guys doing with a Danish in-game leader? People obviously focus on this a lot. What are you doing to make sure this split doesn't happen, where you have this Polish contingent and the in-game leader outside of that?

There are a few things. First of all, of course forcing English whenever we are in a group. Of course we are speaking Polish and it's more fluent communication when Lukas and people from our staff are not with us. But the most important is if Lukas is gonna get bored or he will think it's not gonna work and he will just leave us, then it's gonna be over, but... It's not like I don't care what the community says, but look at BIG. They have four German players, one UK-Polish guy, they are playing like this for almost a year and they are performing well. They were grinding so hard in tier-two online and they became a tier-one team again, I would say.

This is not an issue, and people are maybe underestimating the potential because we are Polish and we speak worse English, basically. Germans speak better English - this is like that, no? And this is why people think like that. I would say it's more about, when there is a team culture, it's built from the people in the team. Everyone brings something, but I'm just trying to make sure that we are building our culture by ourselves.

We aren't trying to be somebody people will tell us we have to be, or what Astralis have been in the past, or my former teams as well. We need to work on the mental part the most and just teach people to be themselves as much as they can. We need to learn each other and we need to know how everyone will react in the game, what their emotions are, who should we carry during the game, holding each other accountable, and just cheering up the others, who will be the leader in the group when Lukas is dead and stuff like that. It takes time, but I think we are progressing pretty fast anyways with all the aspects I mentioned.