zont1x: "I will not be able to be a top five player"
Spirit are the champions of BLAST Open Porto, and zont1x was in stellar form as the team won consecutive events for the first time since IEM Cologne and BLAST Bounty Season 2 last year.
After the 3-1 victory in the grand final over MOUZ, the Ukrainian sat down with NatTea, voo, and Mauisnake to discuss the incredible evolution we have seen out of the team in recent months.
“I cannot suddenly just be the best player mechanically”
Back-to-back trophies. Did that satisfy you a little bit?
Yeah, I'm glad we were able to win, even though I kind of downplayed my emotions, I would say. But I'm a little bit tired of playing and just being away from home, so I don't really feel much, at least for now.
This is surely a payoff, you know? When you think about it, you do sacrifice so much time away from home, so much time from loved ones, when you're also practising even when you are at home, so getting to win back-to-back, you realise this is worth it?
Yeah, of course. That's why we play. Everyone wants to win as much as they can, and this is the second time we are able to win two consecutive tournaments. Obviously, we can tell that we are the best team right now, but as I said like three times already in previous interviews, it won't really matter because the next game we will play is at Katowice, which is a month later. So yeah, it will be a whole other story. So I think in October, the status of the best team won't be very relevant.
What do you think felt different about this matchup versus MOUZ versus the Bounty, which obviously went the way of them?
We didn't connect to the server, in my opinion. We just had no energy for no specific reason. We didn't communicate; we played badly. It was just a terrible game for us. Right now, we play better, I would say.
You're a very introspective guy. You think a lot about the bigger picture and everything like that, and you're next to donk, who's just every single tournament setting records, winning MVPs. But what do you want your legacy to look like in five years from now?
Kind of ropz style, I would say. Like, you have a big impact, but no one really talks about you unless you're literally winning for two years straight. I would say that's what I am aiming for.
I know that with my game intelligence, I would not be able to be like a top one player, top five player, whatever. Maybe I will not even hit top 20 in any of the years. But I think I'm making my impact by some other things, even though I'm not the best mechanically.
But yeah, I think my goal is to win as much as I can and to be able to just have the most wins, probably. I don't know how much I will play the game, but obviously it's very easy right now to talk about. I can aim for winning like 50 tournaments, but in reality, I can never win anything else. So I don't know. I'm just playing.
When talking about this team, so much was about the individuals before. But then you have that time with S0tF1k, and then hally comes back, and Spirit talked about S0tF1k and hally kind of duo coaching. How is that working out now that hally's back?
They have split it: S0tF1k is more of a micro guy, and then hally does more on the macro side, I would say.
So S0tF1k does a demo preparation for us to watch them in retrospect. Like, we lost the map, and we watch it with S0tF1k, and he tells us what went wrong. And the game plan is being done mostly by Magixx and hally. So they kind of have their work to do. And because of that, I would say both of them have enough energy to do whatever they have to do. So we are able to be on tournaments for 45 days and still be able to prepare as much as needed.
When you had S0tF1k, you guys really drastically made your Mirage much better. Is that something that specifically S0tF1k was working on, or was hally involved?
I don't think so. It always goes this way: you have six maps, and all of the time you have at least one map being weak. You focus on that map, and because you don't have time for all of the six maps, another map becomes weak while you're trying to fix, like, this one that you had problems with before.
Right now we have our best map, Ancient, I would say, statistically, even though there are a lot of close maps. But you can see that we sometimes play bad on Mirage. You know, we'll think about fixing Mirage, we will have eight wins in a row, and we will have problems on Nuke. It just works like this all the time.
You like to aim for the body, but recently you've been aiming a little more for the head. What's the philosophy on aiming for the body?
I should aim for the head anyway, no matter the situation. But mostly, I still think aiming for the body, especially my role, is a better way. Obviously, if I had the ability to shoot like kyousuke, for example, I probably wouldn't be doing that, you know. But I understand that I cannot suddenly just be the best player mechanically. So I'm just trying to do whatever I can. And I think I'm able to do enough impact with this style of aiming. It just depends on me.
Circling back to when you're talking about S0tF1k helping you guys with the micro. Is that one-on-one sort of micro? Like, what exactly, when we talk about micro, is it that he's helping either the team with, or you as an individual?
zont1x: The team, mostly. Well, it depends. There is a certain situation with a certain player and he goes like, "you know, you can do this.” But mostly it's about the team as a whole.
