Head Coach Daniel “papp” Hart gave his thoughts after Viperio Counter-Strike clinched playoffs in the ESL Pro League National Championship Qualifier
Today saw the first HLTV win for the team, how important do you think today was for the team’s morale?
I think it is good to get some HLTV wins under our belt as it gets that weight off our shoulders if you like. We have had some really good performances and results in games that were not on HLTV, like our win vs Espionage, however when it is on HLTV it does carry a bit more importance. Today has definitely helped with the team’s morale, but it more importantly shows that we are going in the right direction.
After a 0-3 day yesterday, and a 2-0 win today, how are the team feeling ahead of the playoffs game tomorrow?
Though we went 0-3 we all felt that we played well and showed good potential. It was important to look at the positives going into day two. Ultimately, we lost every single pistol round in day 1, so if a couple of those had gone our way, we could be looking at an entirely different set of day 1 results; but thats MR12 in CS2.
Today we won all of our pistol rounds, which converted more rounds vs low buys which goes a long way in terms of the end score. In general, our buy-vs-buy rounds were strong, and the entire group stage produced some really competitive games against every team. With that being said, I think the team needed the results from today to understand that we are here for a reason, and we can easily hold our ground against on paper tougher opponents.
It looks like you we will be playing Pera again in the playoffs, how are you preparing the team?
Confidence is high right now. With less than a 24 hour turnaround, we will do our own preparation and see what we can change from our game that we have against them yesterday as this time we will be preparing for a BO3 rather than a BO1.
Anything can happen in these games, and they have been playing really well lately, for example they even qualified for the European RMR, so it will be tough. At the same time, if we believe and stick to what we are good at, we can beat them and continue our run into the grand final.
As the team’s time together is increasing, how do you see this effecting our map pool?
Naturally, the longer we play together, the more our confidence in our map pool will grow. We are getting hit with officials left and right this month, so it is really just sticking to our foundations and focusing on what we are good at.
Who knows, we may see some surprise map picks soon. 😉
