On October 1st & 2nd, ESL One: New York was held at the Barclays Center with a heavy focus on CS:GO. Many teams were invited such as Natus Vincere, SK Gaming, and Virtus.pro. G2 eSports, one of the teams invited, came into the tournament as a favorite with many analysts listing them as taking 2nd at minimum. G2 eSports, however, had an unfortunate set of games & was kicked out of the tournament losing every match they played with a 0-3 result. DIG Novalas managed to catch up with shox, G2 eSports' CSGO team captain, to get some insight on what went wrong in the tournament.
The main question that's on everyone's mind is that, coming into this tournament, you guys were big favorites. A lot of analysts were putting you guys at a top two finish. Some were even saying that you were going to take the tournament over SK, Na'vi, or VP. But then a lot of in-game issues happened that resulted in different results. In your opinion, what went wrong?
shox: I think it's a result of what we were doing since August. We came back, we had a really long break, like we had one month of holidays and it was way too long. And since we came back in August, we f***ed up our competition and are making a big failure in New York which is continuing. We worked a lot with the team these past few weeks bringing up new strategies, some new mechanics that we still need to get used to but since the tournament is done, I think we just need to fix our individual level and, in my opinion that is what cost us the event today because we didn't work hard as we should've to improve our individual level. Yeah, every team and every player is above us in terms of pure skill and pure level and it cost us the event.
So, on the month break, you guys spent about a month on holidays so it's only been recently that you guys started practicing again, right?
shox: We came back to practice in mid August but we went for one month of holidays. It was really hard, you know, when you don't touch the computer for a lot of time. Personally, it was the biggest break of my work career since I started CS. So it was a little hard to come back.
Now that G2 is out of the tournament, looking at the current teams, NA has surprisingly had a strong showing with Team Liquid actually getting into the semi-finals and they were not even considered a top team. The remaining teams, Na'vi, SK, and VP; who do you think is going to take it all in the end?
shox: I think all three teams have the potential to take home the trophy. VP has shown that they're a good threat at Bucharest in the past few weeks so they definitely have the level to win the event. Talking about Na'vi, they're doing really good. S1mple is good individually so, they're now in the finals and just beat Liquid so they have the potential to win this event. Talking about SK, it's SK so of course they have the level to take this event but, in my opinion, I feel like they're weaker than they showed us in the past few months. But I think you can see in their gameplay, they're shaky; more than before. So I think those 3 teams all can definitely do it.
Going back to another topic, you said you've been practicing a lot of new mechanics as a team. Are you expecting much better results in the future?
shox: Yeah, sure, definitely. Even coming into the event, we were all pretty defeated, to be honest. But at least we can see what went wrong. We have the game, we have everything, we have every map. We have just need the mechanics. Now, we just have to focus on CS mechanics. Headshots, communication, these kind of things. And just come back stronger.
You tweeted out recently saying this is your first time ever playing in a stadium. How was that experience?
shox: It was really amazing. It's just so sad that I didn't get a chance to play rematch because it's only a best of 1 and we had been really destroyed. It was not the best experience from this point of view but with this crowd, it was really amazing. And I really hope I get to do it again.
Some other players were complaining about the sound in the Barclays Center due to the set up and where the players and audience were. Some players were even complaining about not being able to hear. Is that an issue that you guys ran into and do you think that affected your results at all?
shox: I don't know about my teammates. For the results, definitely not. It's not like this is what caused us to lose. It didn't affect it. Personally, I didn't have any problems, I can tell you that.
Other than the tournament, how was your New York experience?
shox: Pretty good. We went to Time Square and it's really amazing. We're going to try do some stuff another day because yesterday, it was really hard with the loss and stuff. Afterwards, we just walked together to pass the time. After about 15 minutes, we just wanted to speak about the game and watch replays for the next one. So, yeah, we'll try to do some new stuff tonight. It's definitely a good city but it reminds me a bit of Paris because I'm from Paris. All these people and traffic, it's so magical. It's nice and it's a really nice city but there are too many people like in Paris. Since I come from there, I don't really like it.
Alright guys, that's all for the interview! Make sure to check out G2 shox on all of his social media! Thank you all for reading!
