VINI: "[After the Major] we had a break, but the break was stupid"

After a strong Copenhagen Major performance from Imperial, the Brazilian squad set their sites on domestic tournaments. However, they struggled to break out of paiN's shadow, losing in the finals of GET Rio. Nonetheless, their incredible performances have netted the Brazilian team a top fifteen ranking spot, according to HLTV. With rookies Kaiky "noway" Santos and Lucas "decenty" Bacelar making an astounding first impression to the world, praise must be heaped upon Vinicius "VINI" Figueiredo, the team's IGL who is relatively new to the role.

Ahead of Imperial's ESL Pro League Group Stage where they take on FaZe in the opener, Dust2.us' Ryan Friend spoke with the Brazilian leader about the team's progression, recent events and goals for ESL Pro League Season 19.

What happened at GET Rio?

I don't think I can give too many details without getting into trouble laughs. The main problem for me was that they allowed two tournaments to play at once. That fucked with everything, pretty much. They didn't have the best equipment for that. The practice room PCs weren't very good. The stage ones were really good. I don't know how they managed to do that. Playing the stage was good. The monitors were good, the servers were good, everything you could hope for. But when you tried to play online, it affected the whole schedule and they scheduled the tournament one whole day less than they were expecting because of Pro League, so they put like 5 or 6 BO3s in day. It's not a big problem if you have two games in a row, but the PCs were bad and the internet was bad as well, so you can't do that. I don't know, it was just a mess. It wouldn't be so bad if we had won, but second place hurts laughs.

You had a little fight online, what was going on between you and biguzera?

I understand his point of view. We talked in person at the finals during the veto. They were okay after the fact, they know we didn't do it on purpose. We didn't disqualify them because we wanted to, it was more about what was happening. I can understand for the guy, who just lost his spot in Saudi Arabia. They just played bad, it was the semifinal, a lot of emotions for them. I don't think the Tweet was necessary but it happens. It was okay. Their troubles were for an hour and a half. After that, everyone was okay. The real problem was the tournament.

Everybody's friends again?

Yeah. It's a normal relationship. Just like, let's keep doing what we're doing.

Moving onto now everything that you and Imperial have been doing, you've had a really good Major, everything is coming up Imperial's way. You're Top 20 in the world.With that consistent performance, do you now feel you're one of the best teams from Brazil?

I think so! We showed that a lot. I think the only problem is right now Brazil is playing the same teams every time. We've played paiN around six times this month. That's horrible. We're having some weird formats. I don't know why the qualifiers are like that. Even the GET Rio semifinals. We play the same team in the finals as in the semifinal. There's no upper bracket advantage. There should be some advantage. I think we're in a really good spot. Even though we lost GET Rio, I think Ancient was the main problem. That's why it didn't hurt that much I think. They won the veto as well. Congrats to them, they made a bet and it worked. But, right now, here, I think we're capable of getting out of groups. Not gonna jinx it, but we have a good team, good firepower, we're gonna try and rest as much as we can because of the jet lag. We just arrived today. I think we can do it.

About decenty and noway, they're rookies to CS. Getting the Major under their belt, being under the spotlight, how do you see them evolving within this team?

I think they are still learning how to be a player. Getting that far into the Major is really good, but at the same time, it just made everyone super lazy because we worked so hard to get there, and afterward, we had a break, but the break was stupid. We were caught up with "we need to renew strats". We were doing the same defaults. Confidence goes up and down. decenty had an awesome tournament for someone who never played that type of competition before, and after that, you go back to Brazil to face teams you're supposed to beat, but you play them so much, they're just used to you. That's a weird gap that we were having. If we had the possibility to not play anything and just practice every day, that would be a much better experience for us because the teams would be afraid to play against us. Like what FURIA have in the Brazilian scene for four years. They were the team that never went to Brazil. They were in Europe or NA practicing, practicing, practicing, and when they went to the RMR, everyone was scared of them! That's where we messed up this month, but it's good learning for them. Everyone makes mistakes but they make a lot of mistakes. Like they play when they don't need to, they peek when they don't need to, they get very aggressive, stuff like that. They're still learning. It's part of the process. They're watching a lot of new players, watching demos, and they just want to get better.

One player that has really become better is felps. He's had a massive evolution in the past few months, how has he obtained this second wind this late in his career?

I think the new game. The new mechanics were good for him, he's really comfortable. But he got the same laziness as the others. Man, playing online is so different. The teams we face are just super confident. They don't care about anything. You're placing ECL to qualify for the next season of EPL, there's something like 24 BO1s. The teams just don't care. They just run at you. And felps, he loses motivation playing these kinds of tournaments. If we won the finals of Rio, he would have been MVP. He had the numbers. He's gonna feel really comfortable here at Pro League. He's gonna be facing better teams. The motivation is gonna increase, and he's working a lot.

You start against FaZe at EPL, any thoughts about that match up? The maps are strange, they now play Vertigo. That's one of your better maps, and you are gonna ban Ancient, one of the maps they play quite a bit. Do you feel like you know the bans and game plan set for tomorrow?

I think we have the game plan, but honestly, no game plan is gonna win the game if we start doing dumb mistakes. FaZe is a really experienced team. The key to winning against them is the mid-rounds because they just play so well. They don't leave any gaps, they don't do dumb shit. They won't play Vertigo. He tried to bait us at the Major; we didn't fall for that. We're not gonna be playing that map again, especially against them. If we had two bans for this series, it would be Vertigo and Ancient just for them. We feel confident. Maybe try to trick them, thinking we're gonna pick some map and we pick another one they didn't prepare that much, but it's FaZe. We need to show up.

Imperial will make their ESL Pro League Season 19 debut tomorrow as they take on FaZe at 01:30PM.