NEO: "Train pick felt like Christmas"

We had a chance to talk with the MVP of DreamHack Zowie Open Bucharest - Filip "NEO" Kubski, and got his thoughts on the AWP situation, the grand final and the incredible 1v5.

After a horrible display at StarSeries Season 2, the Poles presented the "plow mode" once again and dominated their opposition this weekend, with Dignitas being the only team that put up a good fight against Virtus.pro at Bucharest.

NEO was the MVP of the tournament, but also had the most memorable moment 

In the post match interview, Filip "⁠NEO⁠" Kubski talked to Striker about not making lineup changes and the strength of Dignitas, and uncovered that there is more to what happened in Kiev than what meets the eye.

You're known for not making lineup changes, but you do make more subtle changes in leadership and roles from time to time. Has anything changed prior to StarSeries or prior to DreamHack?No, not at all. Since I think before MLG Columbus, I started leading the team and since then we haven't changed much. We've just been trying to improve strats and stick to the roles we have and it just seems to be working out.What about the AWPing situation, any changes in that department?I think we just gave up, we're a different team and we're not having a strict sniper in the team. It's up to the mood of whoever wants to AWP, it gives us advantages as well as disadvantages in some cases, but overall it's been working for us pretty well, we're more unpredictable than other teams.Touching on the dignitas semi-final, the first map was super quick, but Cobble and Overpass went down to the wire, with the latter coming down to that 1v5 really, what can you tell us about those two maps and dignitas as an opponent?dignitas is becoming a stronger team, you can see they have a strong lineup now and you can also see them improving, playing better and better. So we knew it was going to be difficult, we've been ready for them, I guess. Overpass isn't our strongest map, but we knew we can play it, we had to choose between that and Dust2, so there was an obvious choice for us. In the middle of T side on Overpass, I asked Snax to call instead of me, because I didn't feel comfortable doing it. He did that and it worked pretty well, we started winning some rounds. We played a solid game overall, but we gave up a few forcebuys, especially on Cobble, in the 14-14 round for example, that's just a mistake from our part and it should never have happened. The grand final was quite straight-forward, two fairly quick maps, anything you'd like to say on the topic of Cloud9?They surprised us, first of all by picking Train and also picking T side after winning the knife round, that felt like Christmas. But that was the only match we didn't really know the opponent before the game, so we decided to play our own stuff. Before every other game we got ready, watched the opponent, here we had no idea what would happen. So we just played our game and I guess that's what caught them off-guard.Lastly, it seems that whenever you have a bad tournament or a poor period, you come back so much stronger. That happened again after StarSeries where you went out in last place and now you won an event, albeit smaller, how do you always do that?At StarSeries there was a story behind it, due to which we weren't 100% focused and weren't able to play our game. I'm not going to go into details of the whole story, but we kind of expected that it might happen and it did, so we didn't really feel like that changes anything. Coming here, we knew that was just a mistake at StarSeries and we didn't really look at the result there, we didn't take it to heart. We still knew we were a strong team.

You're known for not making lineup changes, but you do make more subtle changes in leadership and roles from time to time. Has anything changed prior to StarSeries or prior to DreamHack?

 No, not at all. Since I think before MLG Columbus, I started leading the team and since then we haven't changed much. We've just been trying to improve strats and stick to the roles we have and it just seems to be working out.

What about the AWPing situation, any changes in that department?

I think we just gave up, we're a different team and we're not having a strict sniper in the team. It's up to the mood of whoever wants to AWP, it gives us advantages as well as disadvantages in some cases, but overall it's been working for us pretty well, we're more unpredictable than other teams.

Touching on the dignitas semi-final, the first map was super quick, but Cobble and Overpass went down to the wire, with the latter coming down to that 1v5 really, what can you tell us about those two maps and dignitas as an opponent?

dignitas is becoming a stronger team, you can see they have a strong lineup now and you can also see them improving, playing better and better. So we knew it was going to be difficult, we've been ready for them, I guess. Overpass isn't our strongest map, but we knew we can play it, we had to choose between that and Dust2, so there was an obvious choice for us. In the middle of T side on Overpass, I asked Snax to call instead of me, because I didn't feel comfortable doing it. He did that and it worked pretty well, we started winning some rounds. We played a solid game overall, but we gave up a few forcebuys, especially on Cobble, in the 14-14 round for example, that's just a mistake from our part and it should never have happened. 

The grand final was quite straight-forward, two fairly quick maps, anything you'd like to say on the topic of Cloud9?

They surprised us, first of all by picking Train and also picking T side after winning the knife round, that felt like Christmas. But that was the only match we didn't really know the opponent before the game, so we decided to play our own stuff. Before every other game we got ready, watched the opponent, here we had no idea what would happen. So we just played our game and I guess that's what caught them off-guard.

Lastly, it seems that whenever you have a bad tournament or a poor period, you come back so much stronger. That happened again after StarSeries where you went out in last place and now you won an event, albeit smaller, how do you always do that?

At StarSeries there was a story behind it, due to which we weren't 100% focused and weren't able to play our game. I'm not going to go into details of the whole story, but we kind of expected that it might happen and it did, so we didn't really feel like that changes anything. Coming here, we knew that was just a mistake at StarSeries and we didn't really look at the result there, we didn't take it to heart. We still knew we were a strong team.

Virtus.pro #2 Wiktor 'TaZ' WojtasFilip 'NEO' KubskiJarosław 'pashaBiceps' JarząbkowskiJanusz 'Snax' PogorzelskiPaweł 'byali' Bieliński Filip 'NEO' Kubski Age: 29 Team: Virtus.pro Rating 1.0: 1.03 Maps played: 1054 KPR: 0.69 DPR: 0.66 Dignitas #8 Ruben 'RUBINO' VillarroelRené 'cajunb' BorgMathias 'MSL' LauridsenEmil 'Magisk' ReifKristian 'k0nfig' Wienecke