Olleh revealed the problems Team Liquid had once had.

Making it to the playoffs, Team Liquid is now set out to go up against Cloud9. Despite having difficulties in performance mid way through the split, Team Liquid seems to have elevated their team atmosphere and performance from their win against C9 earlier. Olleh, Team Liquid’s support, has given us a glimpse of what problems TL was facing. Olleh explained that his team has overcome these issues and are now ready to show a better performance than ever before.

Below are the interview responses from Olleh.

¤ You have made it to playoffs from last summer to this year spring split. How do you feel?

When you don’t do well in one playoff, you get jinxed. Because I was not able to make it to spring playoffs for 2 years, I have a feeling I am going to do bad in this one. I do have a lot of worrisome thoughts. However, I think we made it to playoffs because the game against C9 went smoother than expected.


¤ Looking back at TL’s performances, do you think your team played better than the expectations when the roster was released? Or do you think your team played worse?

Reviewing the games we have won in the past, we did win all of those games convincingly. However in the games we lost, it was a performance that was not like Team Liquid. Looking over the English and Korean comments from our loss games, there were a lot of people thinking the same thing such as ‘Huh? Why is Team Liquid playing like this?’.

I have had moments when I thought to myself ‘I know we are a good team but why are we playing like this?’. Because our scrim results were amazing, I pondered this thought even more so. Fortunately, we solved one of our biggest issues and is why we are performing better now.

¤ Could you tell us what that ‘big issue’ was?

We always plan our next move while playing. To put it into perspective, we always have one person configure a plan. After the plan is told to the team, there are always 3 people who agree and one person who disagrees. We have changed our execution so that even if one person disagrees, we would still execute the play if we believe it is going to work.

¤ What do you think the ‘one player’ who disagrees is thinking when he says it is a bad idea?

For example, we would have Teleport advantage. If we force a teamfight, we will 100% win. However, our ADC is in a position to farm a huge wave and calls off the play saying he is going to be too slow to follow up. He could just CS the wave quickly while we fight slow, but he just says we shouldn’t fight. In the game against C9, I don’t think we would have won if something like this had happened. We all just said ‘JUST GO! GO DEEP!’, and we won the game (laughs).


¤ Which player is usually the most pessimistic about a plan/play?

Doublelift is a bit pessimistic. Most of the times, it is best to call your shots around the ADC. However, the support, jungle, and top roles have the CC needed to look for good opportunities. Due to this when we want to force a fight, Doublelift always says no. Because of his decision to disagree, all the 2 minutes we have spent to configure a plan goes out the window. It is fine when you have a backup plan if your initial plan goes to waste. But, we didn’t even have a backup plan most of the time. Even though we were at first losing against C9, I believe we were able to win because we actively forced fights.

¤ What do you think Doublelift will think about all this?

Even when I play with Doublelift in soloq, he has a tendency to be pessimistic. This is why I say “Just F****** Go” and start fights. We would win the fight and survive. This was when I knew. ‘When this guy says no, I just need to go in hard’.

When looking at myself a month ago if Peter said no, I believed a 100% it was not going to work out. But after a few games with him, all Doublelift says is no. One time I got so frustrated that I just dove in, and we won. After experiencing this epiphany, I just go in as soon as Peter says the word no. This is why we were able to pick Sneaky out so much in the game against C9 (laughs).


¤ Have your thoughts on Doublelift changed from before?

My respect for him is still there. Peter always tries to make the absolute and clean play. However, his tendency to do this is too frequent. League is a game that you sometimes play with pure intuition right? You sometimes get the feeling that you will win if you fight. The players that have good intuition are usually the outstanding ones.

Despite all this, Doublelift is the type of player who plays off data and not intuition. While other teams follow the call given as a team, our team cannot go through with a call or plan if Doublelift says no. This is the reason why our rotations has gotten a bit slow.

After fixing this issue even if we are not absolutely certain on a play, we move accordingly and execute it as if it was 100%. We played like this is scrims, and all the results were good (laughs).

¤ What are your thoughts on the playoffs teams?

First, Echo Fox started out so good but are slumping a little. With Cloud9 previously being 2nd place, I was scared of them. But after beating C9, I have gotten a lot more confidence. Facing against both Clutch Gaming and 100 Thieves, I don’t think they are necessarily that strong. The team I am most concerned about is TSM.

TSM is a team I want to face at the very end. I usually don’t care too much about the ranking, but TSM worries me.


¤ Talking with you in this interview, I get the strong feeling that you have an incredible amount of confidence.

When we were doing well at the start of the split, I didn’t care about the opponent. The only thing that was to my concern was how well we were performing. But after our first loss, Doublelift seemed to have lost all trust in us and decided to take matters into his own hands. Because of this, the plays that the rest of the team wanted to do was not possible. Since we did solve this issue, instead of being afraid of the opponent, I strongly believe that we can now beat any team as long as we do what we need to do.


¤ Lastly, is there anything you want to particularly say?

Team Liquid has never experienced performing on an international stage. Although the Dota 2 team has went to a lot of international events, the League team was unable to. This year, I want to be the first ever Team Liquid League team to reach international events. If we pull this off, our company president will take better care of us (laughs).