XANTARES: "We sometimes choke so badly, and we need to work on this"

Aurora's star rifler says that the team has more to do ahead of the StarLadder Budapest Major, even with this trophy.

Despite a lengthy career with numerous LAN appearances and stellar individual performances, a LAN MVP award has eluded Ismailcan "⁠XANTARES⁠" Dörtkardeş for years, with his sole MVP award coming from the online DreamHack Open Summer Europe 2020.

PGL Masters Bucharest 2025 has changed that. After starting 2-0 in the Romanian event's Swiss group stage, Aurora avoided disaster with a win in their 2-2 match, besting Astralis to reach playoffs. Wins over B8 and GamerLegion earned the Turkish squad a grand final berth, where Aurora ultimately laid claim to their first notable LAN trophy after a best-of-five that went the distance against Legacy.

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Aurora beat Legacy for maiden notable LAN trophy

A crucial part of Aurora's success came from the efforts of star rifler XANTARES, who posted an impressive 1.27 rating across 23 maps to help drive his team to the trophy, earning the 30-year-old his first LAN MVP in the process.

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XANTARES claims career-first LAN MVP at PGL Masters Bucharest

Shortly after his team's win over Legacy, XANTARES spoke with HLTV regarding his feelings after hoisting the trophy, the difficult best-of-five final, and his thoughts as Aurora prepare for the upcoming StarLadder Budapest Major.

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Congratulations on winning your first big-event LAN trophy. After 10 years and over 750 maps on LAN, you finally made it. Is that a special moment for you? How are you feeling?

I’m feeling amazing. It was a very tough game, but everyone did everything in order to win the game. We’re all really happy about it. After so many long years without winning a trophy, it was really hard to make a lineup that could come to this level — it was very tough for us. Now I’m very glad that we made it. It was a very tough game, and it was hard for the mentality too.

You’re lifting this trophy alongside woxic and MAJ3R — two of the other most experienced Turkish players, such as yourself, and players that you’ve played alongside for such a long time. Does that make the feeling even better?

Of course. We got two young guns who came from the academy team. It took tough times to make them strong players, but right now they’re also very good — they’re doing a good job in every position. That’s it.

You started the game perfectly after winning Dust2 and Mirage, but then allowed Legacy to come back. What went wrong on the third and fourth maps?

The third map was Train. The pistol round is important in the game, and they got some good momentum, and also we did some things wrong. We just popped into some stacked sites many times. Then we went B, and two or three times there were three people there. It was tough, but at one point we were up 2-0 in the overtime, and we went into the stacked site again when they had the MP9s or something.

There were some bad decisions from us, and we also lost some clutch situations — those were important clutches. They also played so well, especially lux. He called very well, and he’s very fresh. He understands the game well, so it was a very tough game.

MAJ3R said that your team is going through a crisis. How were you able to deal with it during the game, especially with the presence of some tension and with not such a great atmosphere on the server going into Nuke?

When we were outside, we talked a lot about staying calm inside of the game, and we also tried to pump everyone on the team up. [MAJ3R] wanted to win these games so much, and he also got a little bit mad on Inferno — about how we lost. He would just call something, and people couldn’t understand everything well.

Then we went outside before the last map and he started speaking in a good way, and then everyone was fresher in the game for the last map. He was just saying: ‘We will destroy them, we will do everything.’ He was pumping everyone on the team up, so he’s a very valuable guy.

Lastly, do you feel like lifting your first trophy as a team will enable you to fix your issues and show us the best version of Aurora at the Major?

I don’t think that it’s going to fix all our issues, but we have one month, and we will just go to bootcamp, and watch our games. We will also talk and try to fix many things. But we also have a little bit of a mental issue inside of the team — we sometimes choke so badly, and we need to work on this for sure.