xfl0ud: "I was not expecting to be benched"

xfl0ud discusses his HEROIC benching and getting the opportunity to stand in for XANTARES at IEM Cologne with Aurora.

A victim of HEROIC's post-season rebuild, Yasin "⁠xfl0ud⁠" Koç was moved to the international side's bench after a respectable six months with the team, during which he garnered a 1.12 average rating and reached Stage 2 of the BLAST.tv Austin Major.

Although xfl0ud did not find a new home before the start of the season, the young Turkish rifler is still getting to enjoy playing IEM Cologne after getting called up to play for Aurora in lieu of star Ismailcan "⁠XANTARES⁠" Dörtkardeş, who is missing the event due to "family reasons."

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xfl0ud to stand in for XANTARES at IEM Cologne

xfl0ud and Aurora have already gotten off to a good start in their Cologne campaign, moving past international side Ninjas in Pyjamas to put themselves within touching distance of a playoff appearance.

Shortly after his team's win in their opening game, xfl0ud spoke with HLTV to discuss the stand-in stint, his benching on HEROIC, and what the future holds for him.

If you can't see the embed above, you can listen to the audio recording of the interview on HLTV's interview channel on Spotify.

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Your first match for Aurora here in Cologne, and a close victory on Train. You had a chance to close it in regulation, then had to come back in the first overtime and did it in the second one. Talk me through the finish here.

Mostly, where we lost the momentum was playing for B control. We wanted to fight and they were coming very heavy at the beginning of rounds. We forced it, they forced it, but mostly they won it. Every round we were trying to put more resources on B lobby to take it, but it didn't work out.

Then I think Wicadia and woxic turned up and did the job for us.

What was the preparation like for this? I know this is not with you on the team, but the story is that these guys haven't won Train in like five months. Was there some specific preparation heading into this?

In practice we felt very good on Train. We didn't do any special preparation, we just checked their last demos.

Also we played against them in practice. That was the most important thing because we saw how they play and our mistakes, and we did the opposite of what we did in the pracc. We knew they would double HE pop, or in practice they were fighting for pop control when they were T side, so we had preparation around that.

Your benching in HEROIC came as a surprise to a lot of people. Can you tell me about what happened there?

I was also surprised. I was not expecting to be benched. But I'm not thinking about it a lot because it's business at the end of the day. Maybe they were not happy with me - I cannot know because I didn't get a lot of details about why I got benched. I don't even know the reason.

But whatever, today I'm with Aurora and until XANTARES comes back I will try to help them reach their goals. I will try to be useful for them.

Do you know if this is the only tournament, or could it be a longer-term thing?

I think XANTARES will come back in the next tournament, 99%.

So how do you see this opportunity for yourself? Being on the bench and not having a team to play for, do you see this as an opportunity to show yourself, to see if you could land a new job?

If I tried to show myself, I would be a little bit selfish, so I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to think about how we can win. When I joined, I saw they have a different system than EU teams, so I didn't want to change their system for myself. I just said, 'Okay, guys, whatever you need, I will try to do my best for you.'

But it seems like you do fit in a lot of XANTARES' positions. Are you comfortable in those positions?

Yeah. I was a very vocal player in HEROIC, and XANTARES is a very vocal player on their team, so I didn't feel any uncomfortable situation here. They gave me some leading positions and they said, 'you can control whenever you feel.' So I'm trying to do my best.