s1n on tough Dallas opponents: "We'll try our best and keep our chins up"

M80 were dealt a rough hand at IEM Dallas, forced to play FaZe in their opening match at the home event. They unsurprisingly lost, but put up a good fight in the best-of-one. After the match, Dust2.us' Daniel "Scoobster" Khurgin spoke with the team's IGl, Elias "s1n" Stein, about the match, M80's trajectory, and next matchup.

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

Tough loss to FaZe, what went wrong?

We knew it could be Ancient, for sure. That was our go-to map so expected Ancient. We had a game plan; I feel that we got disturbed by their gameplay, so we couldn't fulfill ours. We had a sloppy start on the CT-side, especially. It was 6-0 or 5-0; it's hard to get out of that, especially on CT-side. I wish we would have a few more T-rounds, since we had a good game plan to go on, but they did a good job punishing us, they had a good start on their T-side, so it was tough for us to get into the flow of the game.

Can you talk about something they did that disturbed your game plan, as you said?

We know karrigan has these rounds that he creates before tournaments, kinda set rounds, trick rounds. He disturbed us with those. Basically, we tried to adapt to his defaults, but we always need to be ready for the set rounds, and yeah, we got clapped by the set rounds. Then we got reset again. These rounds, I think, are what FaZe are actually known for.

For the past few months, even before you joined the team, M80 has been super dominant in North America, but you've always seem to be one step behind Liquid or Complexity. What will it take for you guys to take that final step and become competitive internationally?

Well, we beat Liquid also, and Complexity in pracs, we prac against them a lot, especially in NA. I think they have the experience in tier one tournaments, especially on LAN. This is something that we need to figure out. When you combine it with the loss today, I feel, for example, our voice comms, are a problem.

When we play online, we are more calm than on LAN events. It's just a fact of experience, in my opinion. We need to work on our comms, especially. I think we have good gameplans and skilled players, it's not like we're super far behind, it's just getting more reps. Especially with the two new maps, Dust2 and Vertigo, I think it's a huge change, so getting reps in, getting voice comms sorted and experience on LAN.