Snakes Den NoVa: "At that point it was just a resilience battle"

What is Fragadelphia if it is also not just a competition on the server, but a battle of emotional and physical endurance as teams have to go through all sorts of technical delays, off-server antics, and long, long schedule days as the unpredictable happens. The events are known for going well, well into the night with one Fragadelphia event famously ending in a draw in the wee hours of the morning. This year's Fragadelphia CS/DO is not immune from those issues as Noah "NoVa" Vaknin has already been playing for a quite a while.

On Day 1 of the event, Dust2.us' Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore spoke with the Snakes Den player about Snakes Den's long long day which saw them play three Bo3, making playoffs at FRAG, and NoVa's journey since starting his career at 12 years old, among other topics.

Please note that the full interview can be found below on YouTube, while the transcript has some key snippets from their conversation.

The match against Artemis really went the distance, something not many people would have expected. What are your thoughts and feelings coming out of that series?

I definitely think it was an interesting set of circumstances because we had to run to a different LAN center in the middle of the game, come back after a couple of hours. We were very fortunate that the other team was willing to work with us but I think at that point it was just a resilience battle, like who can come in out of these crazy circumstances and come out on top. I think our team is very used to doing that, we have a lot of experience doing that in playoffs but those guys [Artemis] are very good as well. I have been to LAN with Control sometimes and he is a great caller and player, and that team in general is just really solid. I'm not so surprised that they managed to pull it close, especially considering the circumstances of the day.

You played three BO3s today, are you guys exhausted?

I'm personally gassed. We all woke up at 5:45 am because we were super excited to play and that was an interesting decision because by now we have been up for so many hours. It's definitely nothing new, we are used to playing a lot, the Advanced playoffs are a gauntlet, but fortunately that training put us in a position where we are able to just push through and get that energy going, even after losing in playoffs and carry it over to this LAN and just fully shift our focus to this.

You had to run to The Block to play your ESEA Advanced match. I heard that you had some trouble there, what happened with your equipment?

Unfortunately, there was a PC crash, then we moved to a different setup, then someone else's PC crashed, then we would move to a different setup and there was a problem with the native resolution, everyone had to play native no matter what and half of my team plays with different resolutions so that was already uncomfortable. There were a lot of issues with Logitech G Hub, one of our players couldn't do something with that. Every time we though something was fixed, another thing would be broken. Luckily, the team kept it together mentally, it's just very hard to play in those circumstances but we are also grateful to The Block in general just for being open, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to play at all.