FalleN: Prepared for all situations

SK had a surprisingly easy path to the semi-final as they defeated G2 16-7 in the opener and finished their group stage with a 16-8 victory over FaZe. 

After his team secured a day off and a spot in the playoffs by only dropping 15 rounds against two top-four teams, we talked to Gabriel "⁠FalleN⁠" Toledo about the opposition at the tournament and the matches played so far.

Looking at the teams here, with the top four teams in the world in attendance, which one did you maybe look out for the most? Was there anyone you were preparing for, someone you thought that you would face and that you would need to beat?

For this tournament, of course, it's the top four, they are the teams that we should be looking for, but especially G2 since we didn't' beat them on LANs in the recent past. G2 is the team that we were a bit more scared about at this tournament. But I don't think scared is the right word, it's the team that we wanted to beat, to prove that we can beat them and get back on the track.

We have to be very concerned about all of the teams here, though, every single team here can do damage so we need to be ready for all of them.

You talked about G2, that was the first map and it was a pretty dominant win for you. How did it go from your perspective?

We kinda expected Cache to be happening, so we kinda studied the map, the way they played against us the last time we matched up. On this match, in particular, we started with a good pistol round, we were looking for the fights a bit more as CT instead of what we did last time, which was sitting passively. And it paid off because we got the important kills in the fourth and the fifth round.

And I think TACO was a beast in this game, he did a very awesome job. He did more that you normally expect from a player. He held his site and got multiple kills, which is really hard to do. So TACO was a very important piece of this match.

The match against FaZe on Train had a lot of T round wins on both sides, anything special happening there?

It has been like in the past as well since our team knows how to play proper Counter-Strike on the T side. We can play a lot of styles, heavy execute strategies, we can play a loose style, we can play to our opponents, depending on what was happening during the course of the match.

I think that all the hard work before the match is what makes our T side so good because we know which decision we can take, which fights we should take and how to react on the fly. My teammates are very smart in all those decisions because they think about it before the game and they are prepared for all situations.

Looking forward, there is a decent chance you are going to face Astralis, you didn't face them in a BO3 for quite some time. Any thoughts on potentially meeting them and playing against them?

I think Astralis is one of the toughest opponents and they have a very good map pool, they are good on almost every single map, except Cobblestone. It's going to be interesting, it was a while since we last played, but if you look in the history, in the past, we won a lot of BO3's against them, so we are not scared.