Relyks: "It felt particularly good for us qualifying for an event like [IEM Chicago]"
After their defeat to Kinguin, Danish "Nohte" Allana had the chance to speak to Skyler "Relyks" Weaver about his team's performance in Montreal, the state of NA CS, and eUnited's recent tournament placings.
You guys played ENCE yesterday, and that started out pretty rough. How did you guys deal with that loss and what did you do to reset when you went back to your hotel?
We went to the hotel to try and watch the demo, or at least the VOD together because the demos weren't uploaded right away, but we couldn't on our hotel TV. Normally there's ways to get around it, but we weren't really able to so instead we just sort of talked about it. Honestly, we kind of felt it ourselves during that game, something was just off, we were very disconnected, our comms were just not as they usually were.
We were getting rolled in the beginning but we started a slight comeback, I think we lost 16-9. We lost I think 2 or 3 anti-ecos, and that really kills you. That's a swing round for their team, they have money, you're broke, so we talked about re-approaching how we take anti-ecos on different maps. We know that was kind of a... not necessarily a fluke, I mean they're a good team, but we just weren't ourselves basically.
We said just reset for tomorrow, we play the loser of Kinguin and Red Reserve — we didn't know at the time yet — so we watched them play, and of course our coach had prep work for both teams. So once we knew who we were playing, we talked about what kind of maps we were going to go for, it's a best-of-three so the veto process is gonna be different, and how we wanted to approach it and make a gameplan.
Speaking of that gameplan, you guys picked up a pretty decent Overpass win today, and then you went into Nuke and that was a bit rough on the T side to start. I wanted to quickly touch on deciding sides in best-of-threes, for me it's weird that tournament organizers keep flipping between picking sides on your opponent's pick and knifing for sides. For maps like Nuke that's a big swing factor, right?
I was actually surprised, I didn't know that that was how the format was dealt with. So when we went live on the first map and it was our pick, it's Overpass, and we were knifing, I was kinda confused because I prefer the fact that if you pick the map the other team gets the side. Teams that are super strong on Nuke, Train, maybe Inferno, maps like that where CT side is generally — for us it's a little bit more even but — the preferred side.
They can still lose the knife round, pick the map and lose the knife round and still get T side, but the fact that it's not just determined by you picking the map, they pick the side, 3rd map you knife cause it's a decider map. That's how it is most of the time, and I was kind of taken aback. I don't really like it because like I said, it gives teams where those are their strong maps more breathing room, where they can just pick the map and have a 50/50 chance to get the side that they want.
After Nuke you guys swapped over to Cache, I noticed on your CT side you conceded mid control a lot, it was mostly you at white box and someone in Z a few rounds. Was that part of your gameplan going in, or was it something you were forced to do because you had very little utility to fight?
It wasn't really part of the gameplan coming in; I think we 1-3-1'd a round or two and for the majority of our CT half we had very little money. We either would be getting reset, or when we won a round we won it with one person alive winning a 1vs2 or something. So we had no utility to hold mid, we had poor weapons.
It's just hard if Ts have good money and they're taking mid on Cache with a Z smoke, a vent molly, a sandbags molly, 3 flashes, like if you're just mid with 1 smoke you're kinda out of luck. It was more so around praying that I get the info, we give mid, and then we would take A main or take another part of the map. It wasn't part of the gameplan, it was more so just a playing-with-what-we-had type of thing.
You've been in-game leading for eUnited for almost exactly 6 months now, tell me about how that's been for you since you weren't originally an in-game leader and had to pick that role up, and how you've had to develop and call at different levels of the game.
I've played with several different notable in-game leaders throughout my career: I've played with seang@res, FNS, SEMPHIS, kinda the NA staples as far as IGLs go. They didn't necessarily call on every team that they were on, like SEMPHIS hasn't called the whole time, but they have different types of styles. I haven't tried to copy any sort of IGL style.
The thing with us is that we've been a team for about 6 months, which might sound like a long time, but when you consider the fact that during this whole time you're playing in qualifiers and leagues, going to events, travelling and all that stuff, that whole 6 months isn't 6 months of just pure practice. Not only was it me picking up the IGL role for the first time, we were rebuilding from complete scratch on the team. We didn't reuse any of their old strats, any of their old setups.
They might suggest something like "oh we had this on this team" and then we would talk about it, but we had to rebuild everything on every map while we're also playing at the same time. Like we're playing in MDL while we're practicing so it's like "oh, next week is Inferno, let's start going over Inferno."
So we were kind of playing catch-up, but I think now we've sort of developed a baseline on all the different maps, we have all that sort of stuff, so now we're able to go into more specific things. Point out smaller mistakes we're making and other smaller changes we need to make, which I think is definitely good.
Even with frustrating losses like this, it gives you a lot of material to look at and to learn from and review, and I really do think that even when it's in the moment and you're frustrated and you're not really thinking about any sort of positives. But on a positive note you have a lot of data to look at now, and since it's such small mistakes it's a lot different.
Let's say you played a team and you were just getting completely out-aimed across the map. There's not really much to review there, they didn't tactically outplay you, they didn't do anything crazy, you were just getting outskilled or maybe you were all having an off-day. But when you lose close games like this it's moreso the really small mistakes that make the difference, especially with a 16-13 game. One round that goes the other way could be 16-13 for us, so it gives us a lot to look at.
Speaking of working on different maps, you guys played Mirage against ENCE yesterday. It seems like a number of pros, MDL pros, are starting to gravitate away from the map. What're your thoughts on Mirage as a map, and if Cobble was to come back do you think it would replace Mirage, or another map?
People consider Mirage the new Dust2. It's been played so much and it's been around so long that there's nothing really new that happens. Even though they did rework Mirage recently — they removed the skyboxes to allow for different nades and stuff — Mirage is very... I'm not gonna say it's very scrimmy, but it becomes the same thing. People either take mid control and split, or they just throw all the mid control nades and they scrim A or B.
It's a lot more enjoyable for me to play it in a team environment; when I'm playing it in FPL or a PUG I just despise it because it's built for that. I don't necessarily know if it would need to be replaced... I think if Cobble came back, if people really had to choose — besides the people that just want a map to be removed because they don't like it — I think that Mirage would probably get replaced. Cache is kind of a favorite of a lot of people, people really like Cache.
Cache is getting a remake too, supposedly for sometime in 2019...
Yeah he's working on it right now, so probably Mirage if Cobble came in. Because they're not going to replace Nuke, they're not going to replace Inferno or Dust2 because those just came back, probably not Overpass. I could maybe see them replacing Overpass with Cobble because they did just rework Mirage, so it would be weird to be replaced. I dunno.
On the topic of FPL, FPL in NA is pretty puggy compared to a team environment especially, but I would say even EU FPL is a little more structured. I know some NA pros like steel aren't big fans of the style in FPL. Do you think something like FPL and Rank S sort of further added to the puggy style in NA, and do you think it's been negative factor towards the development of younger talent?
I'm not particularly a big fan of FPL either, but outside of team practice it's still better than pugging or anything else, y'know. Honestly a lot of the time it's simply a higher skilled PUG. I don't know how this happened, sometimes you'll get some good Counter-Strike played, both teams have an IGL that's calling, everyone fills in a role, and you'll get competitive games in it. It's actually a lot more fun and a lot more rewarding than when it's PUGfest.
I think it's definitely a bad thing and a negative influence — there's a lot of people in FPL that aren't pro players, either they're MDL players or they just grinded their way there through the PUGing system, and I don't understand why people are so... I don't know if they enjoy it, they find it fun playing like that, because it's a waste of time and effort and you're ruining an opportunity where you are playing against other pros and semi-pros, you can learn to play good Counter-Strike, and instead they just play it like it's a normal PUG and they continue their bad habits that aren't going to go away.
Then they go into a league environment, maybe they're playing MDL or something like that, and they try to replicate the same type of play and it doesn't work. You have to make a conscious effort to not play like that outside of just matches in order to build good habits, to break bad ones, to start learning to play structured CS like it's played at the team level.
Some people just don't care, maybe they don't even realize it, maybe they think "oh I can just play like this in FPL but I'll be more serious in matches", but you play how you practice.
Let's talk about some of the Brazilian and international teams that are moving here to NA. I was talking to the Brazilian steel yesterday about whether Brazilian teams like oNe and FURIA moving here had helped to reinvigorate some lower tier NA teams to play at a higher level like FalleN's Luminosity did when they came on the scene, what are your thoughts?
I think maybe it's helped a little bit, especially because a lot of these teams aren't playing in Pro League. They're playing against the semi-pro competition of NA so a lot of these teams get to see how they play. It's kinda funny because obviously all the different Brazilian teams don't play identically, but they do kind of steal a lot of things from each other and you'll be like "oh, FURIA is running this MIBR setup."
I think maybe realizing that when a lot of these teams come over and when they're playing in these semi-pro leagues they're typically pegged as favorites for that league because they're moving their way up trying to get into pro with the likes of MIBR and LG and what not. I think they've definitely had an influence on how the semi-pro level of CS is played in NA.
You guys just narrowly missed out on the Major, you took down NRG which was a massive upset and fell 0-2 to compLexity. What happened there, and what was it like for you?
Yeah, thinking back on it it's really unfortunate because you come to play an important match and sometimes it comes down to who shows up that day, maybe their players are feeling it, maybe yours aren't. We played well throughout the entire tournament, we eliminated NTC, we played Rogue and narrowly lost 2-1 on the 3rd map 16-13 or something like that.
Then we dropped into losers where we ended up playing NRG, which like you said was a big upset. They were probably the favorites for the entire event based on their recent play and we beat them 2-1. The next day it was the final match aside from the grand finals which was just for prize money.
coL was playing really well the whole tournament, they beat Rogue in the final match too to take first place at the Minor, but we just didn't show up. It felt nothing like the day before when we played NRG, our comms were scattered, people weren't very high in energy, and it was a disappointing way to end a pretty successful run.
You played coL again in the grand finals of the MSI MGA qualifier as well, they 16-1'd you on the first map and then you ended up losing 2-1. Was that a similar situation with who ends up showing up on the day, was it nerves, or is there just something about compLexity that's difficult for you guys to play against?
compLexity's had this revival when they brought stanislaw and ShahZaM on board. Speaking of individuals, recently yay has been on fire through multiple tournaments, even right now at the Major he's playing really well, he's a very key part of their team.
Even when he stood in for Swole at Frag...
Yeah when he stood in for Frag, that was like the biggest upgrade you could get, you know. I think coL, they've been on the rise for a while, and I don't know if it's necessarily nerves, I don't think it's something about how they play. There's information about how they play, you can see how they play as a team and what not.
I think it just comes down to taking the information of knowing how they play and how we want to play the match, and then showing up with confidence like "okay, I know what he does upper B and I'm going to take this fight and I'm going to be confident about it." A lot of the time coL has some crazy pistol rounds, we played them in that Bo3 and I remember we lost all 6 pistol rounds.
So what happens is you lose pistol round, you don't eco them, it's 3-0 at the start, it's first gun round now and you have low money. A lot of the times when we played them they would live with 4 or 5 both rounds, so they're building up bank. If they win the first gun round or even if they take you down to 1 player, they won that round with 4 Mac-10s or they kept people alive with SMGs.
They build this bank and then they have so much confidence, you have 1 guy alive on your 5th round, which is a reset round, and then you lose that. From there it doesn't even matter if you know what they do, you have no money, they have so much money, and they're taking every fight. dephh is flying out upper B, yay is doing whatever. All 5 of their players are individually very skilled, and the same can work any other way.
We've played against teams where we win pistol and first gun round and we run away with the half, we have like a 13-2 half on Overpass because everyone is feeling it, you're confident. When you have economy and you have some rounds behind you, you're more prone to making these risky plays rather than thinking "okay, it's a reset round and I have 1 smoke, I'm just going to play it safe."
I think that is a big part of what separates the tier 1 of NA pros and teams versus the tier 2. Understanding the situations where even when you're low on money and low on rounds, when you need to make a play like that, still having the confidence to do it rather than "I'm afraid I'm going to fuck up, I'm going to give them the entry, my team is going to blame me for losing the round." Just knowing that you need to do something to help the team win the round.
coL's not afraid to do that, you watch how ANDROID, yay, Shaz, dephh, how all of them play. It's like they all have $50 each, it's a reset round, and yay is pushing somewhere to get info for the team so they can go stack something and he gets 2 kills doing it and then they win the round.
Bouncing back from MSI and the Major qualifier, you guys took down Cloud9 to qualify for IEM Chicago despite their default map advantage. Talk to me about how that felt, finally getting a big qualifier win and making it to your first premier, 16-team, $250,000 event.
It felt particularly good for us qualifying for an event like that because we've gone through so many qualifiers where we typically go pretty deep into the qualifier, like semifinals or grand finals, where we lose to the other pro team in the qualifier like compLexity or Rogue or something like that.
To finally actually close it out and make it through was... it was a feeling of success, of finally... a lot of these qualifiers are all day, so you spend 10, 12 hours playing CS and then you lose the last match, it's like the whole day was just a waste. It felt good. And to speak on how we played that whole day, but particularly that best-of-five versus C9, is a very good example of playing as a team at our peak versus when we just don't show up.
Everyone was making different plays to win big rounds, the comms were nice and concise and clean, no one was making mistakes based off of pressure or anxiety or some sort of stress. Everyone was just playing how they're supposed to play, doing their job. To do that at the very last stage versus a team like C9 was a big thing for us.
eUnited is next set to play in ESL Pro League Season 8, which still has quite a few rosters left to complete. They will also attend IEM Chicago in November alongside Liquid, MIBR, NRG, and Renegades.
