siuhy: "We are still yet to fully go in-depth in practice with EliGE"

The Polish in-game leader admitted he was disappointed with how Liquid bowed out of Bucharest.

PGL Masters Bucharest ended in disaster for Liquid, a 3-1 record in the group stage to reach the playoffs shadowed by a quarter-final defeat to SAW with two blowout map losses.

It was the team's third event since replacing Russel "⁠Twistzz⁠" Van Dulken with Jonathan "⁠EliGE⁠" Jablonowski, following third-place finishes at Birch Cup and CS Asia Championships, but a lack of practice remains a glaring issue for the team as they now turn attention to the StarLadder Budapest Major.

"It’s no lie that we are still yet to fully go in-depth in practice with EliGE, so it’s going to show on some maps, and throughout this tournament we’ve had some maps where it was just a struggle to play and we just got completely destroyed," Kamil "⁠siuhy⁠" Szkaradek admitted after the loss to SAW.

The Polish captain spoke about Liquid's practice plans heading out of the tournament and how they'll look to resolve some of their issues ahead of the StarLadder Budapest Major, with plans to use practice time to properly integrate EliGE and his ideas into the team.

You can listen to the interview here.

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You just suffered a pretty tough loss to SAW in the quarter-finals of PGL Masters Bucharest. It might be difficult to say right now, but could you please share some of your thoughts on that game?

Well, starting off with the tournament itself, we actually had a pretty good run throughout the tournament. We had some close games, and we had some blowout maps that we got completely destroyed on, and that kind of carried on into this game as well.

Starting off with Ancient: we had a really good run, we felt really confident coming into that game, especially that map. Coming into Train it was just a complete reverse. It’s no lie that we are still yet to fully go in-depth in practice with EliGE, so it’s going to show on some maps, and throughout this tournament we’ve had some maps where it was just a struggle to play, and we just got completely destroyed — that happened today on Train.

The last map was more of a disappointment from us — definitely not what I anticipated and what we were aiming for. I think we had what was needed to win that game on Inferno but something went wrong. I’m going to look back and talk with my teammates, and look back at the game about what exactly went wrong. But I think that we were just not finding ourselves in situations that we would normally find ourselves in. We were playing a little bit unorthodox Counter-Strike on T side.

Yeah, that’s about it. I think they played really well as well, they punished us for all the mistakes that we were making, and not being in the positions that we were meant to be. They capitalized on it and fair play to them.

As you pointed out, you haven’t really had the time to practice as much with EliGE. Do you feel like those blowout maps, where you start the series well and then get crushed on the second or third map, could be more of a psychological or mental problem for the team? Or are you just looking at the in-game side of things?

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a psychological thing for the team. It’s honestly as simple as that we’ve been going from tournament to tournament with only a couple of days of practice with EliGE. Shoutout to him because he’s also yet to fully and comfortably get into our system, and also tell us about how he views things, and how he likes certain things. That is something that we are yet to get into. We’ve started working on it, obviously, throughout the couple of days that we had, but it was never easy.

Moving forward, after this tournament, we’re going to have a few days break, and we have a good amount of time to prepare for the Major. I think that is going to be the time that we’re going to use for EliGE to get into our system and work on our map pool, because as we could see during this tournament, it was not the greatest.

Lastly, bar implementing EliGE into the system, what are you going to be focusing on primarily heading into the Major?

Finding consistency on all of the maps. We are still lacking a little bit of a meta touch to our playbook throughout certain maps. There are some maps that we feel really confident on, there are some maps that we had to put aside for now, so we’re going to have to catch up with the playbook on those maps. We’re going to have to work with Jon, like I said, on certain things.

Overall just finding consistency on all of the maps, building all of the maps to a certain level where we will feel comfortable in the vetoes, to pick them and to play them as a third map. Or even if an opponent wants to punish us by picking it. That’s going to be our main focus. We have a good amount of time for that, and yeah — I’m going to stay positive throughout that period.