A young veteran who starts CS2 with a bang

They had never played an official match before they kicked off their Rise of Legion campaign with the online qualifiers and in their first official tournament together, they managed to win the event. Captain and tournament MVP credits his team's success to team synergy and spoke to Dust2 India about winning the Grand Finals of Rise of Legion Kolkata amongst other things.

What are your immediate reactions and emotions after winning one of the first CS2 LAN events in the country?

It's really amazing the feeling, I can't express it. Didn't think we'd win but had the trust in my teammates and didn't think about the results. We just played our game.

The most unique factor of your team was that this is the first official tournament you guys played, in fact the online qualifiers were the first official match for you guys. What do you think helped you guys stand out amongst more reputed teams?

The main thing was their trust and faith in me. All of them are elder to me, above 30 years of age. But even then, there was no ego, they put their faith in me, trusted me and my calls. They were very patient, didn't overcommit. I think at the beginning there was a bit of overconfidence but I had told them, we can be overconfident in a way that we know we won the opening map and over-peek and commit extra in the second map but that wouldn't help us.

We used the confidence in a manner which helped us to better our communications, trade better and that's exactly what we did.

Inferno was a tight start but second half you guys quite literally took the bull by its horns and took charge of it, what changed?

Honestly we just simplified the game. I made sure we were just hitting A again and again and our opponents had no counter and I used that to our advantage. I played a bit of a mind game there, called back-to-back A hits which they did not expect. I think they were expected us to not hit the same site so many times in a row. We got them to waste their utilities very early on in the maps and after that it was easy for us to take map control.

Let's talk about you getting the MVP of the tournament, a top fragging IGL, how do you make that happen?

Honestly I was very free, I trust my team and my team trusts me and because of that I could play my game and also construct set-ups. It helped me focus on my aim and also on the calls. As an IGL I know multi-tasking is required and that's what I did. I kept it simple, didn't overthink. Whatever information I got, I acted on that. The thing is I make calls at the start of the round and mid-round and at the end its the team who sets it up.

I set up the play and after that I let the team take over from there and then we close it out together. I don't keep talking throughout the rounds and I have been calling for almost a decade now so the experience is there.

Can we expect to see Usual Suspects at more tournaments in the future?

The thing is we took part in this tournament to enjoy ourselves and then we came so far. Of course we had the belief that we can win but we just wanted to play. We self-funded our trip (from Jaipur to Kolkata) and it was only because we wanted to play. Coming to whether you can see us in the future or not, the thing is, like I said, apart from me, three of the four guys are above 30, some of them have kids and even have their own jobs.

It's unlikely we continue for all tournaments, maybe once in a while but it's not possible to switch careers for them at this age. Plus the opportunities for them at this age aren't there so there isn't a lot for them to continue with.

What about you, can we expect to see SmokeA at more events?

I am always looking for opportunities, the only issue is where I am from (Jaipur) there aren't any organisations or any opportunities. Organisations mostly always look for players from there own region, it's economically feasible, communication is also easy and that's a given fact. We don't have an Academy system in India either, organisations only care about wins, not the process of building a team - I'll be honest, our orgs here don't want to invest money - they only want immediate results and victories, no one thinks about the future.

Even if our orgs set-up 10-11 academies for the youngsters, our country can go far. There are a lot of youngsters with potential but the opportunities are less. The orgs here don't have patience - they want immediate results and if you can't provide them they will cut you after an event or two. That's not how our country will go forward, you need to setup a system, put faith, build academies and give the youngsters an opportunity. If the youngsters are given an opportunities only then can we move forward.