Q: How are you feeling is a dumb fucking question, but I’m kind of obliged to ask it. How are you feeling after that series?
Licorice: Not great, obviously. I felt like I had a pretty rough game 1, personally. I think I was just feeling really nervous, and that kind of showed up in my play. I felt like I actually got more comfortable as the series went on, so that was probably the one positive from today.
Just adjusting to playoffs, I don’t know. I still feel like I’ve been adjusting to being back in LCS the whole split.
Q: I think people don’t talk about nerves for veterans as much as they should. What is that like?
Licorice: I mean, it affects everything. If I’m too nervous, or if I’m too scared or something — and I don’t mean scared to take trades — but it’s like I’m not in the moment, it’s like I’m slightly behind a lot of the time, or in fights I won’t see angles right away, or I’m just not in a good state of mind to really see what the best play for me would be. […] I was too slow to adapt to what was happening.
Q: How do you deal with it?
Licorice: For me… I don’t know. It’s just a lot of the grounding stuff, you know? Try to take deep breaths and un-panic yourself. I think posture is a big one. I think fixing your posture when things like that happen will make a big difference. Nerves are a huge deal. At the end of the day, it’s humans that who go up there and play the games and […] everyone who works with athletes, they look at their sleep, food and stress levels.
All of that matters the same in esports. You need to be in good condition when you show up, so I think there’s a lot of work that goes into that. Sometimes you just, like, don’t sleep that well, or you have a rough night, or shit happens.
Your state is really important to manage as a pro player. I think that’s the biggest thing when I took a break from LCS and I was coming back — it’s trying to get dialed in, trying to figure out
“What’s a good routine for me? What’s a good time to wake up and eat food and practice and go to sleep? …”
Q: Have you been nervous in the regular season games too, then?
Licorice: I would say it’s something I’ve struggled with my whole career, just nerves and anxiety and all that kind of stuff — and struggling to show up and feel like myself on stage.
Licorice: That’s something I’ve struggled with a lot, and I’ve made a ton of progress on, it’s still not perfect. I think it’ll always be something I struggle with in this job, and just have good and bad days.
Today started off bad and got better from that perspective, at least.
Q: How do your teammates and DIG’s culture help with that?
Licorice: I think they make a huge difference, but I don’t know. I don’t think that’s been a huge factor today or recently. I think our culture has some problems as well as some great things about it. That’s probably the main thing we talked about after the game — just like, we need to get better practice. We need to take things more seriously.
So I think that [culture] is a bit of a double-edged sword. But yeah, your environment definitely matters. The more people you have to lean on, I’ve always found that it made a huge difference to feel like I had someone who had my back or was in my corner; who really believed in me.
All of those are really important things.
Q: Do you want to talk a bit about that post-game conversation?
Licorice: The general gist of it is just, like, our scrims haven’t been very good. We make a lot of mistakes, we’re known as a pretty notoriously bad scrim team.
We felt like we had a bad read on the meta today, and we had bad practice leading up to the match, so that was just the big thing that got talked about.
Q: What are your steps as a team to make sure you can make the most of a lower bracket run?
Licorice: I mean, it’s really simple now. Lower bracket runs are nice because they’re so simple. It’s just, like, you play everyone one after another and you have to beat them all. But for me, it’s making sure that I just feel better about the individual 1v1s. We spent a lot of this week lane swapping, and then we didn’t actually pull any successful lane swaps off, so I was a little dizzy from that also.
I think making sure I get the 1v1 practice if I’m not getting it in scrims. I think we just need to get on the same page as a team. Like really, if we show up and do the same thing, and all die together, that’ll already be such an improvement.