SmokeA: "BO3 will be an advantage for us"

After taking down Airavata (AVT) Esports in the second semi-final of Rise of Legion Kolkata, Usual Suspects' in-game leader SmokeA had a chat with Dust2 India speaking about the intense semi-final.

An extremely back-and-forth game, you guys started strong but then they managed to finish the first half strong before going on a six-round streak in the second half. You guys still managed to hold on to comeback, as an IGL what were your emotions, how did you manage to keep your team calm?

I was thinking a lot about how to counter, when they tied up the score at 8-8, I called for a tac-pause. I told the guys to change the pace. I asked the guys to first take control, if you actually see our play, it's very different from what was on display. So we switched back to our default. In our default set-ups we lost two rounds which was because we were playing a bit too slow (we were faking on both sides and then going for the executes). Since this wasn't working, I decided we should take control first and play together, let's trade each other. Once we switched to taking control and direct executes things started working for us. It's not necessary that things always work out the way you want it to, thankfully it did today and I'm really proud of myself with the calling.

You mentioned that this is the first time you guys are playing officials together, that also on the big stage. We saw you guys lose a couple of man advantage clutch situations, what was going through on the team comms during these situations?

Yes, that is true - this is the first time we are playing together in an official. We have been playing together for over 10 years, we have a community in Jaipur and we have played a lot together but never officially. My other teammates, all of them started playing through CS 1.6 so they all understand the game but yes in those clutch situations there was some confusion. You could see the LAN pressure, the calls were there but execution on those calls weren't perfect. We could call to double swing but the timings would be off and things like that. When we started losing a couple of rounds, the tac-pause helped so that we calmed things down. Once we switched game to our game-style the comms also calmed down and things fell into place.
I feel in our country, our players lose their patience very easily. If they're losing a of rounds they either don't take pauses or if they do, they end up using that time to rage at each other.

It's been BO1s till now, the Grand Final is BO3, do you think its an advantage for you?

Speaking honestly, it's in our advantage. It's going to be worth it. We have come all the way from Jaipur to Kolkata. So we were looking forward to BO3 semis also but the TO said it'll be BO1 and we had to accept it but now it should be in our favour. In BO1s anything can happen, but in BO3 even if we lose the first map, we can come back, take out time.