IEM Season VIII - Cologne

Cuando les dan el carton con el premio, veo a darien ahi, como el quiere la cosa el tio, acabas de ganar un dineral y el cabron ahi como si la cosa no fuera con el xDDDDD

No os parece curioso?

Inspired by Diamond and Genja posts I decided to share my feelings about the travel and tournament too.
It was long time compared to LCS between the travels so I even missed my Gambit Comrades and was looking forward to meet Edward and play with him on Lan again. It hurt to go out of family again after such a break but it was not for a long time and my wife was looking forward waiting for the tournament cheering me up and hoping for us to win.

We were traveling with Edward and Genja from Moscow, Darien came by himself earlier and Diamond went with MCJ (our photographer and media editor). Arthur came tonight and Groove came on the next day right before the games.
In the evening of the day me and Danil made the research on our russian enemies because we knew that we shouldn't underestimate them. We knew that their main heroes were Fiddlesticks and Shen and he looked into their jungler plays and said that he is not bad I knew that Fomko is not bad too because I met him a lot in SoloQ but I was pretty sure that we can outplay them on LAN because of their lack of international experience. Our games went smooth against them but I think that they got really good potential and if they wont break their team they got good future in the Amateur Scene and maybe can reach LCS. Bad luck they meet us

The next day was the day against C9 and Fnatic.
We couldn't do research on them because of no tournaments with them after the worlds, but we were sure that their playstyle wouldn't change much. I think the games against C9 were the hardest games for us of the tournament.
In the first game I fed firstblood to Hai because that was high risk high reward situation. If he died there we would get fb+assist+diamond would get a lot of creeps on lane and he would lose a lot. Diamond got those creeps, but Hai got fb and I got no gold from lane, w/e shit happens. Diamond could dominate Meteos this game and our team played super good. In the second game I missed some ulties on Orianna but my team played really well and when enemies thought that they could engage us, Edward met them with 4man Annie ults. I think we got inspired after long break, the fact it was IEM and Edward being back to us. Genja was like the new man killing people apart.
The games against Fnatic went much easier that we expected. Maybe they underestimated us or they lacked the trainings but the games were really easy. In the first game our enemies played pretty passive so we were slowly taking advantage and building items. Darien dominated Soaz really hard and that gave us a lot of free objectives. After we got our items we just pushed to victory.
In the second game Diamond solo carried the game on his famous Evelynn. OP first blood bait by him xD made enemies lose flashes and then feed a lot of frags in revenge. He got lvl 6 first on map and couldn't be stopped.

I would say I didn't play super good this tournament, but I feel that I started to play much better and will try to increase more. I feel that I got understanding of several aspects of the game that helped me a lot during the tournament. I think that Diamond fully deserved MVP of this tournament, but Edward, Darien and Genja played supergood too. I think it was hard decision by the viewers, but the last game against Fnatic made the huge DOT in Diamond's Favor.

I want to thank my team for this awesome tournament and it seems that Genja started to play much more relaxed with Edward. I hope nothing will change and we can handle all the internal storms that will come to our team.

I want to thank all our fans watching us and rooting for our victory.

My thoughts about the past tournament.

A couple of words about our preparation. As usual, we played a lot of scrims prior to the tournament. The combination of private life and problems with servers didn't allow us to reach our optimal shape, but I think that every team had to deal with it, therefore everyone was in equal conditions. We experienced both wins and losses in our scrims, therefore it was hard to say how strong our team was - we could only test it at the tournament. When we arrived to Cologne, I found out that we are going to play фе ESL Arena, that hosted LCS matches. I was pleasantly surprised when I realised that the tournament is going to happen in the familiar place.

Let's talk about the games now. In the first match we were playing against the Russian team. I wouldn't say that we were afraid of playing versus them, but it wasn't particularly pleasant, since they are Russians too. If they were supposed to lose, I would prefer them to get eliminated by someone else... But this is sports and everything is fair, therefore we couldn't change anything. Their performance was quite good, if they will resume dedicating time and training, they can become successful. Just don't let down now, no one like to lose. Even though they didn't win anything, I am still happy for them, qualifying to this tournament is already a success.

Afterwards we were playing against C9, I think these were the toughest games for us at this tournament. We don't know much about them, but they are the strongest team in their region. It is quite hard to play against an opponent that you see almost for the first time, but we practiced with them at World Finals.

In the final we were playing against Fnatic, just as we expected, but these games turned out to be easier than against C9, whereas the victory was even sweater, since lately we've been usually losing to them.

This way we won this tournament. Thanks to everyone who was supporting us, especially those who were in the audience, as it is always pleasant to hear people cheering for us ) Moreover, this victory allowed us to qualify to IEM World Championship, that is going to take place in Katowice, therefore winning was twice as pleasant.

I would like to add my two cents about an odd confrontation between Doublelift and Rekkles. I don't get why both of them have to show off in front of each other, both of them are skilled players. Today one won over the other, tomorrow the other one can win. I can say that I believe that Rekkles' play is more rational and correct, but it is not a reason to start a fight. Each one of them has his own team and both of them are leading their tams to a victory, the difference is that they are trying to reach this goal in their own ways.

That's it, thank you for your time.

Good day, everyone. I just returned to the mother Russia after such an amazing tournament and i'm happy to share some inside experience from there with you, friends.

There was a huge break between s3 finals and the moment when we decided to go to the IEM Cologne and try to get the quote for the IEM finals. Before that we were practicing only in soloq and not that much even there. When decision to go there was made, we immediately started our teampractice, but after a few days beautiful EUW servers have shown us their great performance. They took more than a half of a week of practice from us. Things were looking really bad, even though we were doing well in scrims(in my mind there was always a really annoying thought: "does those results, against the guys who are losing as much time of practice as we, really matters?". We knew that we are gonna face C9, who are not suffer that much from their servers).

It wasn’t really hard to get my skill back, because nothing has changed in jungle since s3 finals. I knew exactly which champions are the best and just practiced the shit out of 'em.

So we arrived to Cologne. I always like to travel there, because its really awesome to live on the banks of Rhine, and the weather there is very similar to my own city's weather, which i like as well.
I will not talk about the first game, because there was nothing really interesting about it. But the second one was really epic. The strategy there was to not let them take such op champions like elise or shyvana therefore we should've ban them or firstpick them for me/darien. But the thing which i haven't told you yet was: i've had only 4 champions in my pool, since we've had a lack of practice due to server lags. And when they started to ban my junglers, it could have turned into a big problems. But, fortunately, in the first game they left my Vi open and got raped for that. After that game we realised that C9 are taking nocturne over much more dangerous junglers and it suits us. So we just banned one more jungler to force them to pick nocturne, and that happened. But it took out my last jungler, so i decided to play lee for the 2d time in 2 months. Wasn’t a big deal Even though i messed up with "insec" on rumble once, my overall play wasn’t as bad as i expected. I even won pretty much every smitewar in those two games.

After that, another "best jungler in the world" was beaten for me. It was a great experience to play against them again(we scrimed a lot on s3 finals) and i was very happy with the result, but we should've proceed to the finals against our toughest opponent - Fnatic. By that time we had already lost 6-8 games in a row against them. And we really wanted to get a revenge.

In the finals everything went just as planned. First game was a patient work on two things:

1. disable Rekkles from farming
2. help our malphite to get his DFG to just oneshot Corki, who was refusing to build mres.

...everything, except one little thing: in the second game i by mistake fed fb to ashe. But we've seen that someone lost his flash to get me(as we realised later - it was ahri and ashe), and it turned out into a huge stomp after two easy kills, which couldnt escape from our champions w/o their flashes. I felt sad for Rekkles dying against me again and again, but i had to keep doing it Nothing personal, bro.
In the end we finally got our revenge, first place, and i even got another MVP title from IEMs. I cant describe how it was cool to get it all. It was just... AMAAZIIING!

Now we are taking a break for 1 week, because we are going to our Chinese fans in Shanghai. And then we are coming back to hard practicing. We need to take the victory on the Battle of the Atlantic tournament not only for ourselves, but to help the whole our region to be better than NA!
Thank you friends for supporting me through everything, for raising my morale and for a useful advises. *special thank to the guy, who advised me bluepot start on evelynn on my stream, you are awesome!

I'll try to stream before our trip to Shanghai. See you