sjuush: "Fuck the haters"

After taking a tough defeat at the hands of the imperious NAVI, Heroic's Rasmus "sjuush" Beck sat down with Dust2.us' Dafydd Gwynn to give some post-match comments. The Danish player spoke about their confidence after winning the first map, the crowd being against them, and what needs to happen for them to go further at the next major.

Obviously that was quite a tough loss, second year in a row that you guys have made it to the quarterfinals. Starting in the beginning, how were you feeling coming off of that first map?

We felt really great. We had such great plans on the first map, and the individual plays and communication were on point, things like "Peek on my contact" and stuff. Everything was working perfectly, so we went into the second map quite confident as well. We were surprised that they left Ancient open, we felt like it was a weakness by them, for the first time of not banning it. Also, we started CT on both maps, so we were pretty confident going into those two maps. Sadly, we couldn't win but...

What do you think changed in that confidence from the first map coming into the second?

I don't know what changed, we had the same confidence going into the second map. But obviously, we are way more confident on Inferno than we are on Ancient, but we still feel that our Ancient is way stronger than it statistically is. So I mean, we had a really good idea of how they play and how we want to play against them.

You were able to slow down s1mple on the first and second maps, but he came alive in the third one. Did you have a plan as to how you were going to shut him down?

Not specifically, we had some plays to kind of shut him down because we know what he likes to do and what grenades he throws, and what he does after those grenades. So we had a good idea of how to play around him, and kind of not give him any peeks or entries. We got him killed a few times when he tried to get those entries, so that worked great on Inferno for example. I can't remember Ancient that much, but he didn't have much impact compared to what he used to have against us.

Talking about your team, it's tough to go out, thinking about how the meta right now is very much about having a strong AWPer, IGLing isn't really the meta anymore, is that something you guys are going to stick to or is that something you'll look to change in the future?

I don't think we're going to look for any changes. We've had some communication problems during Katowice and ESL Pro League, which is why we lost. We watched them both, with our communication and how the match ended up, and why we lost. So we worked on that in practice and we could clearly say that here, for example, we were way better than at Katowice versus FaZe where we just got completely shut down. So we can see improvements, it's still not good enough since we clearly want to beat NAVI, but we're getting there.

Well, last year in the quarterfinal, we had the same interview at the same time, what's going to have to change for us to not have this interview in the same scenario at the next Major?

I trust in the team that we can keep improving. For me, I can clearly see improvement from what we've done from the beginning of the year to now. People feel way more confident doing the small plays, and in stressful situations, people don't fall back and let them [the opponents] do their thing, we keep pushing forward and trust our instincts which we didn't do that much before on LAN, because we were more afraid. But now we feel more confident in ourselves, and we've been in more situations - stressful situations - on LAN and we thrive in those as well, in chaotic rounds where there's, like, 20 seconds of a round left.

Obviously, refrezh plays a variety of roles, but they're all seem to be quite aggressive and that's kind of his playstyle. He went off and was insane for the first two maps, just how important is he to the team's success?

Everyone has a role in the team. I don't think we rely on refrezh completely, he does his things, if it works then it's good but if it doesn't, then we can still find a way around it and have a good plan to win the round anyway.

s1mple was riling up the crowd, and that's what cadiaN was doing as well in the first map, how does it feel to lose when the crowd is completely against you?

I mean it kinda gave me some energy to just... fuck the haters you know? I was shooting at the dead bodies to get a reaction from the fans out there. Because they were booing, I want them to boo even more to keep me in the mood to just destroy them and I was feeling really good when they were booing.

Do you like being a villain?

Not exactly, but if the crowd wants to boo when we get on stage then they deserve to get played with.

sjuush and the rest of the team won't have to wait long to play with the crowd as they travel to the United States for IEM Dallas which starts on May 30th.