nitr0 on Liquid's Nuke: "We've been putting a lot of time into it"

After taking down Nouns in an easy 2-0 affair, Nick "nitr0" Cannella spoke with Anastasija "Heccu" Tolmačeva to discuss the newfound love for Nuke from Liquid and the upcoming re-match against paiN.

Congratulations, your first win here in BLAST Showdown. We expected you to win against Nouns, but we did not expect it to be on Nuke because it used to be your permaban, then you stopped banning it, and now you're starting to pick it. Do you feel incredibly comfortable with Nuke?

We've been putting a lot of time into it. It's one of the maps that we wanted to get good on. Looking at the top tier teams in the scene right now a lot of teams are really good on Nuke. There's a lot of footage and stuff and strats that we can look at and change it up. Obviously, it's good to have a fresh feel since we haven't played Nuke in the last couple of years.

I haven't played since 2019 so it's really fun to come back to the map. I really like the map now, so overall it's a really good breath of fresh air coming into it. We played Nuke back then, but Astralis was just always a better team on it than us. I think we were the second best Nuke team in 2019 right behind Astralis, so we know that we can play the map and it was just a matter of time before we start finding our footing on it.

By winning today it means that your next opponent is going to be paiN. You played against them recently and the results that you got were probably not the ones that you expected. Did you learn anything from that series that is going to help you in the upcoming one?

When you lose against a team it's better to play them again. The match when we played against them wasn't that good from us, especially me, I had a really bad day so I take a lot of blame. I'm gonna rewatch the games for the next time that we play them in two days to figure out what went wrong. Obviously, we already reviewed the game and talked about our mistakes, but for me personally, I don't know why I played really bad against them, but I plan on playing a lot better so I need to figure out my own side of things.

In terms of the team aspect, we don't really play them too much in practice because we're playing a lot of European teams so maybe I gotta study them a bit more and figure out a better game plan against them. They're a really good team and have shown that they have a lot of potential and I expect a good game against them.

I am sure that you're really motivated to get revenge. A fan voted question from BLAST.tv is this; Would you rather go 13-0 and lose or go 0-30 and win?

0-30 and win, duh.

nitr0 and Liquid are scheduled to play against paiN this Saturday for a spot in the Grand Finals for the BLAST Premier Americas Spring Showdown and to eventually see who will get a chance to play in Washington D.C.