100T FBI: “I think that we’ve leveled up so much as a team and I don’t really think FlyQuest is better than us at all.”

Q: What was that series like from your perspective? How stressful was the back-to-back days?

FBI: I don’t know, the games are pretty chill. I think definitely our matchup vs C9, everyone in our team expected to be much harder than the Shopify matchup. So I’m happy that we got to get a pretty easy series because we’re going to have to play FlyQuest tomorrow.

Q: Obviously, you expected to win — but did you really expect to be *this* dominant? It didn’t look close.

FBI: Honestly speaking, I was expecting to 3-0 Shopify. I think a lot of the time their wins come from their mid jungle, I would say. They’re pretty good at finding angles. [River and Quid] just do the same thing but better, so I really didn’t think we would have many problems facing Shopify today.

Q: You’ve been consistently underestimated throughout your career, in my opinion — do you ever think about that? Why do you think that is?

FBI: I mean, personally, I do feel like I got quite a bit of that throughout my career. I think from the start, I was definitely hyped up after the Golden Guardians years, but just throughout the recent years, I don’t feel like I get too much credit when I’m doing well. And then when I’m doing poorly, I feel like people like to dogpile onto me, so it is what it is. But at the end of the day, I’m a veteran now, so […] it’s harder for them to find good things in veterans, I would say. 

Q: Thoughts on FLY’s level and the matchup overall?

FBI: I definitely think FlyQuest is a really strong team. I think obviously Inspired is a really talented player and he’s generally pretty smart about the game. But with that being said, I think that we’ve leveled up so much as a team and I don’t really think FlyQuest is better than us at all. I think it’s just really going to come down to who plays better on the day and how the drafts play out. I’m feeling really confident [that] we can take down FlyQuest. I’m hoping that it’s going to be a fun series.

Q: Massu got a lot of attention last year at Worlds, but hasn’t been as focal this year compared to Inspired + Busio. What do you think of his play and the individual matchup?

FBI: Well, I think that it’s really easy to play AD carry on a winning team. And I think obviously, like I said before, their jungle support are generally very, very solid. So I think he kind of has — I wouldn’t say an easy role, but I think he generally finds games pretty comfortable to play. But with that being said, he has very good mechanics and he likes to push his leads when he feels stronger than you in the game. But I think recently he’s been making a couple more mistakes than he would when he was playing really well at Worlds, for example. I mean, we’ll see how we go tomorrow. 

Q: Did you just go full rest after the series yesterday to prepare? Is that what you’ll do today?

FBI: I went straight into Arena games when I got home. I don’t know about everyone else, but I think that yesterday’s series was obviously a lot more hard fought; the adrenaline and the dump of relief that you get after winning a 5-game series to qualify for the next stage of the bracket or whatever definitely [made it] hard for me to sleep at night yesterday. But I think today we had a pretty comfortable series and I don’t really think the emotions ran too high today. So I think we’ll be much more rested for tomorrow.

Q: So even stronger than you looked today?

FBI: Well, don’t know. It just depends how you sleep, you know?

Q: Did you prep last night or today? What’s the plan for tomorrow? 

FBI: We did a little bit of draft talk last night and this morning. I think at this stage, everyone kind of knows what everyone else plays, and when you’re playing fearless, only the game one draft matters because there’s so many variables in the next two or however many games you play. They generally don’t take too long, I think draft is pretty fixed right now, especially for red side — Azir and Pantheon [are] just really, really strong picks and they’re generally perma-bans. There can be some variations, but generally drafting from red side, you’re a bit locked into what you can do. 

Q: Is facing Gakgos the free win the narrative seems to suggest? Or is he the insane player that LS has talked about?

FBI: Obviously I don’t play top lane, but I think Gakgos is a really talented mechanical young player. I think his hands are pretty insane, at least from what I’ve seen. But obviously he’s still a rookie and he’s still very inexperienced, so there’s many areas in the game which he might not understand completely yet or [he] might not have the best idea of how to navigate certain situations. I think Bwipo is like the opposite. Mechanically, he’s okay, he’s decent, but he’s got a wealth of game knowledge and if he can help Gakgos — I don’t really know how their relationship works — I think Gakgos can definitely be a very strong player. I don’t know if they’ll want to sub him in for the finals or… I don’t know if this is the finals. Is it the finals tomorrow? 

Q: No, it’s the last series of the elimination bracket.

FBI: Yeah, I definitely think that he’s a good young talented player and he can definitely go places in the future. But I don’t know if they’d want to sub him in in a high pressure situation in whatever the elimination round is. So I don’t expect that we’ll be seeing him tomorrow, but you never know. I think he can play certain champions much better than Bwipo can mechanically. So, I’m not sure.

Q: *Now* I want to talk about KBBQ.

FBI: Yeah, I saw that whole drama. I think it was just Bwipo being Bwipo — he loves to talk; he loves to hear himself talk. He’s obviously just assuming things that just aren’t true and then going out in public and saying it, I don’t really think there’s any other way to put it. It’s pretty disrespectful, I would say, to the C9 players and to C9 in general, because, like I said, he’s just assuming things and just blurting it out in public as he always does. That’s pretty much it.

Q: Still, the larger thesis was about why FLY scrims differently; why they FF scrims early and why they don’t like C9’s approach to scrims, which Inspired and Isles have also talked about. Do you agree with that?

FBI: No, I definitely don’t agree. I think it’s really dependent on your team. It’s hard to just put out a blanket statement saying that, “the game’s over, let’s just go next”. Because some teams want to work on their mid game, some teams want to work on their late game, some teams want to work on their early game. It’s just not really fair, I would say, if a team doesn’t want you to remake the game and then you just say, GG, go next. That being said, I don’t know how their practice works and what kind of environment they’re in — it’s just really team dependent. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer in terms of how you want to approach scrims like that.

Q: And on the second part — do you think C9’s approach to scrims being more mechanical/focused on winning and less coordinated/focused on improving?

FBI: Well, no, because I think when we scrim Cloud9, they are a really coordinated team and they do generally play really well. I think they were probably the best scrim team throughout this split. They generally play very disciplined and they play well as a team during scrims. I think they just had a lot more nerves and pressure when it comes to the stage, so I’m not really too sure what Isles and Bwipo were talking about — but everyone has their own read of different teams.

Transcription help from @delfidotwav