SpawN: "You cannot win games just by reads"

Despite their valiant efforts in the first semi-final of DreamHack Hyderabad 2023, Enigma Gaming fell short of victory. After the game, we caught up with their IGL SpawN to discuss about the game.

Tough game SpawN, in hindsight, do you regret not banning Ancient since it's Marcos' strongest map?

On Ancient we were prepared. We knew for sure they will pick Ancient. And we knew they will ban Anubis so we prepared Mirage. We had planned this before playing Firedup, that is why we didn't pick Mirage against them. I wanted to save it for today, and I think it worked for us. We played really well.

You had pretty good reads, especially on pistols. We saw on Ancient and Mirage that you had an idea where they want to push and you were well prepared with a stack.

My read was on point. But, you cannot win games just by reads. Their shooting was on point. But I am positive about my team. On Ancient, we actually wanted to start as T, but someone said we should choose CT first and try to get as many rounds because our T-side is strong. But now it hits me that had we chosen the CT-side first, we could have won 2-0.

On Mirage, we never saw you take mid control, except for the last round. And you were able to win the map off of that, whose call was that?

On the last round, we knew they will go B only. They would take late mid and end up on B. It was a good call from N1kace, and then even I said that let's walk up to high mid and wait there. So we had a good read there.

You have a lot of young blood on the team. When playing on a big stage, do you think they can get carried away by the momentum due to their inexperience?

I wouldn't say they are inexperienced. I think the meta has changed on Inferno drastically. They were playing fundamental CS. We just couldn't execute properly. I told them that if leave banana, take Apps control, but I think we failed there. We played really passive. We discussed our game plan, but on the server we couldn't translate this. I think we were not too focused, but that happens sometimes so it is okay.