Jame on crucial crash: "We had to accept it as is and move on"

The Russian IGL says he and his team have no time to be sad.

Virtus.pro have not had a lot of success at Majors ever since their win in Rio under the Outsiders tag, and Dzhami "⁠Jame⁠" Ali previously talked to HLTV about wanting to bounce back from the "previous fiasco" at the Paris Major RMR.

This time around, Virtus.pro qualified for the Major without much difficulty and came agonizingly close to a playoff spot after a three-map loss against G2, during which the Russian captain suffered a pivotal game crash in a 4vs4 post-plant situation.

Virtus.pro lost the map after the crucial round and couldn't bounce back on Anubis, which meant their Major campaign ended on a sour note. Despite this, Jame insists he has to accept the situation and show the community what his team is capable of.

---

Editor's note: Jame answered the questions in Russian, and his answers were translated by Russian-speaking HLTV staff.

---

Jame, heart-breaking loss in this final Major match for you. Can you just tell me how you’re feeling especially after the crash that happened on Inferno? Because that was obviously a crucial round for you guys, and you seemed to alt-tab or crash that kind of changed the outcome.

I lost six Majors probably, and each time it was very painful and disappointing. But now specifically, at the moment, I don’t really feel anything, because this is stage one, when you are devastated, and you still don’t understand what happened and so on. I think it will get worse. But there is no time to be sad. We have a new tournament soon, and this is a chance to rehabilitate ourselves before the community and show what we are capable of.

I guess you were affected by the round as well... When the round ended, you kind of just didn’t seem to react too much. And after the game, it didn’t seem it got into your head at all. Can you tell me a little about that?

It's part of the game. It's bad that this happens to us too often. Something similar also already happened in a match against Spirit. But in my memory, this has happened many times. So when you have another map ahead, you should not give in to your emotions and blame the game, or PGL, or start arguing. It's just a waste of energy. Especially, knowing the situation, such moments never get replayed [by the TOs]. So it was pointless. We had to accept it as is and move on.

dastan had also said that other players crashed three times. Can you tell me about that and that kind of affecting the game as well?

Yes, fame crashed once, and mir had very strong freezes. All this was on inferno. This, of course, has a strong influence, but these are not the things that... I’m upset not because we could have lost somewhere because of these bugs, but because we are not such a strong team if we fight for these split seconds. Yet our ambitions are much higher. This is just another proof that we should work the way so that even such things can’t affect our game.

For you, when you got through the RMR to make it to this tournament, you said that you’re glad to make it back to the Major after the fiasco of the previous one. Coming into this tournament, and having the results you did, how do you feel after that?

A year ago it was 1000 times more painful. In addition to the fact that we played poorly, we were changing players, all this put a lot of pressure on everyone, everything was up in the air. Plus, there was burnout because we trained a lot. And when you train hard and it doesn't pay off in the end, your pain from failure is much worse. But now I think that we deserved the place we took because we did not show a good level of play on all the maps. We can perform well on some maps, but our map pool is not strong enough to go deep, or even win a Major at the moment.