EliGE: "Everyone thinks you suck until you win"

The North American superstar talked about Complexity's slow start to the year.

Complexity came into the Major as the sole North American representative, and their form ahead of the event made for difficult reading. Jonathan "⁠EliGE⁠" Jablonowski and company failed to record a single victory at BLAST Groups, exited IEM Katowice in 9-12th place, and barely squeaked through the RMR after a close-fought win against Liquid.

Complexity's form at the Major has been much better, though, as the North American squad battled past paiN and HEROIC for a spot in the 2-0 pool. The North Americans are thus just one win away from the Major playoffs, with MOUZ standing in their way from a clean 3-0 sweep.

After their overtime victory against HEROIC, EliGE talked to HLTV about his insane performance against the majority Danish team, his collaboration with an aim coach, and Complexity's expectations for the rest of the Major.

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Insane game, insane end to the game. Apparently we missed a spray transfer at the end you did, but did see the 4K one that was also insane. Tell me how you're feeling after that with the double overtime and everything.

I'm just super happy. Honestly, I still feel really focused, like I felt I was really into the game the whole time, I felt in the zone, and I'm just happy that we're playing at a really high level right now. I feel like we're making a lot of really good decisions, we're assessing the situations well, and I think Johnny [JT] is calling a really good game as well.

It was a bit back-and-forth toward the end and they seemed to be countering you pretty well, we heard them say they were going to abuse you on B a bit. Talk me through that, both at the end and the early portions before OT.

In regulation, we knew that they were not doing much toward B. They had a couple of rounds where they found that we weren't there, but that was usually on the low buys and they were mainly finding openings on A and Mid. So it was pretty much that type of battle, and then in OT, that's usually when it changes and both teams kind of know how each other are playing.

It's just always that type of battle where you're trying to out mind-game the other guy, and it was a really hard game. kxysan was calling really good stacks at the right time. When we were trying to go up A on our T side he had three or four there, like on one round he had four there, so I think they were calling really good gamble stacks. It was a really close one.

They had some perfect timing on breaking some of the nades as well.

Yeah, we were trying to go for a play, we even called for floppy to do that play, go into the smoke and try to backstab them, but they read it well again. They found the nuke on the smoke, found him there, and it was just a really hard round after that. That was just a game where I feel like both teams were feeling on their A-game and feeling in the zone, and thankfully we got the better of them this time.

Let's talk about that A-game because you come here, there's eight teams who've been playing for the last couple of days, and a couple of the favorites lost today in their opening games. Arriving here and being able to go 2-0 and show that A-game right away, how does that feel?

It feels really good. At Katowice, we didn't really play that well and we've just been trying to constantly assess how we should be approaching our practice and everything like that. I think we found a really good solution for how we want to improve our practice, and when we got to EU here for the Showdown... We had a really unfortunate, jetlagged game, which wasn't very fun.

Kind of unlucky just with the circumstances of the schedule, but that gave us an early bootcamp for the Major and we learned a lot during that bootcamp. We had a lot of good things that we set out as to what we should be focusing on in the matches, and we started applying that and started being very serious about trying to win the scrims and apply that match mentality for the start of the Major. That helped a lot. JT has been calling very well, and I just think we've leveled up since we had that bootcamp, and I'm happy that we've been pushing it forward into our first games here.

Talking about your form, you've been playing incredibly well individually for the last while, more or less since the switch to CS2. How do you feel individually and about your insane ramp-up back into some of your best form?

I'm super happy about it. I'm just in a really good environment at the team, they allow me to play at my best, they allow me to fail, they let that happen and it's my job to fix my mistakes and play as best as I can. I feel like I'm surrounding myself with that type of environment where I'm able to fail and that's been really beneficial for me.

I've also just been doing everything that I can in terms of making sure that my mind's sharp, I have an aim coach that's been helping me named Matty, and he's been awesome. I have a really good routine and flow of how I want to feel the game out, and my mechanics are also feeling good.

What is the aim coach doing to help?

He's just assessing my gameplay. So I'll send him stuff to review and he'll give me pointers of what I should be focusing on or what aim trainer routine I should be doing. That is what I've been doing with it. There are people with insane aim and he is one of them.

You are only one best-of-three away from getting to the playoffs, which would be an amazing result. How do you feel going forward from this and having three best-of-three chances to make it?

When we started the Major, we knew that it is going to be hard and we're going to have to keep on building on our wins or whichever losses are going to be coming because obviously every team here is super good. These are the best teams in the world at the biggest tournament and it's not going to be easy. We weren't expecting to come in here and dominate everyone, still not expecting it. We're going to have to keep ourselves grounded, make sure that we're still learning from every single game, and stay focused on our process.

Today was a really good first step in that, everyone was playing extremely well, our calling was good, so it's just keeping up with that. We're of course only going to be facing really strong teams in best-of-threes, so no matter how it goes in any of the games, we need to keep going forward. We have really good mental in all of these games, we're calling well, and individually people look super sharp, so we have a lot going for us right now.

How hungry are you to make it back to the playoffs of a Major?

I'm extremely hungry. I still don't have my gold coin, I want my gold coin on the scoreboard. However much people think it's out of reach, just one game at a time, and like I said in Sydney, everyone thinks you suck until you win. We just have to keep not sucking and play our best.

When you say gold coin, you mean the Major trophy coin, right?

Yeah, yeah, the Major trophy coin.

You're in your new jerseys here. It's just temporary for this one game from what I heard, but being able to put the old compLexity on, have Jason Lake here hyping you up before and after games, how does it feel to have that environment back?

It's really cool, he's definitely a hype man. He's very charismatic and it's really fun being in this environment with him here. It puts everyone in a really good mood and we're just focused on having fun and playing our best.