Rambo: "We have a really good infrastructure setup for success"
Michael "Duck" Moriarty sat down with compLexity coach Ron "Rambo" Kim to discuss the team navigating Relegation, and what the future holds for their rejuvenated lineup.
So Rambo, you and your team have secured your ESL Pro League spot for next season, how much of a relief is that for you and your team?
It's a big sigh of relief, especially considering the circumstances before coming into this event, we had picked up stanislaw and ShahZaM. We were practicing with that crew, so this was kinda just last minute. These guys coming in and being able to, on short notice, perform and win, it's a huge sigh of relief for all the players, for the organization. So a big shoutout to Slemmy and Professor_Chaos for coming out and performing.
Having to play with your analyst and an out-going IGL, how much of a struggle was that to make sure that you and your team could perform?
Obviously with such short-notice we weren't able to prepare as much as we would like, but fortunately Professor_Chaos, our analyst, knows most of our strats and our nades. And Slemmy had been playing with this crew on-and-off for about eight months before this event, so fortunately we were able to get the maps that we wanted, and maps where we had strats already established. So we took advantage of that, and that's how we won our matches.
Heading into the next ESL Pro League season, what will your main aims and goals be with your new roster?
Moving forward the sky is the limit for us, we feel great. We feel like stanislaw and ShahZaM fit in the roles that we needed, they're phenomenal players, great LAN experience, so I think we've got pieces right now. Obviously we're going to try to making every LAN, and qualify for every big tournament.
The other online league you've got is ECS, with you guys forfeiting the remaining games because you had to be here. How confident are you guys going back into the next re-qualification competition and securing a spot for the next ECS season?
Obviously we would have just liked to qualify and move right in, but we couldn't do that because we had to forfeit some matches, and we had some tough losses during the season that could have paid off big for us. But again, this new lineup, I feel fantastic, we all feel great, the vibe is good, so I feel like we have a pretty good chance of re-qualifying through the Challenger Cup.
Your team has DreamHack Open Summer upcoming. With your new lineup, how confident of making an impact will you be at this event?
Well we've got about a solid month to practice ahead of time, so that's gonna be plenty of time for us to prepare strategically and get all our maps down. I'm excited, again the future looks bright with this team, we're gonna be ready, and it's gonna be fun to watch and see this new lineup play an international event versus all sorts of new teams that we never played before.
You yourself have fairly recently come into this role as a coach, how much of an impact have you seen yourself make, and how much of a journey have you made as a teammate from when you joined to now?
All of 2017 last year, that was my first time coaching, in Korea, with team MVP. I learned a lot from that experience, and I'm bringing that in with this new team, with compLexity. English being my primary language certainly helps a lot. I'm still learning, I'm still trying to figure out how I can best help the team, figure out a system where we're utilizing our practice time efficiently, trying to fix mistakes. Just making sure we're getting better every day, and that includes myself.
With the setup that you and your team have in Dallas, with the office, with your individual apartments, with the amount of background help you have from the compLexity organization, how much does that help you improve day-to-day in terms of gameplay?
One of the major reasons I moved from Korea to join compLexity is because Jason Lake and the staff and the management really care about their players, so they really take care of us. We've got great apartments, we've got great internet, we've got an office we can all centralize in and practice, so everything out of game is taken care of. We just solely focus on getting better as a team, so with the combination of our analyst, I have a coach helping manage things in-game, we have a general manager as well. So we feel like we have a really good infrastructure setup for success.
With their work done in Leicester, compLexity will now head back to Texas to really start hitting the books with Peter "stanislaw" Jarguz and Shahzeeb "ShahZaM" Khan. In the relatively near future for the team will be the Closed Qualifier for ESL One Cologne, as well as their first LAN outting at DreamHack Open Summer.
