League of Legends can rip a lot of emotions out of you, especially when you lose. G2 Esports Jungler Marcin "Jankos" Jankowski talked to Lara Lunardi about the G2 slump during the 2020 Spring Split of the League of Legends European Championship and what losing does to his mental.

Let’s start by discussing the G2 slump.

The week that we went 0-2 we didn’t have a lot of preparation, we played only two days of scrims and didn’t really understand the patch at a high level, and I believe that at that time, when both 10.4 and 10.3 were out, we understood 10.4 way more. We didn’t play our best drafts and our best games.

I think competition in Europe is harder than it was in Summer Split or Spring Split last year, so it’s not only one us to lose those games, it’s also on the opponents to win them, right? A lot of people say that Perkz is bad, a worse Mid Laner than Caps was, and that he should be AD and Caps mid. I think that’s not necessarily true and they both need time to adapt again, and even though Perkz played mid before, he really needs time to be good at it again and Caps needs time to understand the bot lane a lot better. The change is good for us, they also understand the roles more now, so by the end of playoffs we will still be on top, I still believe we are the strongest team. We will be even stronger than before since the competition is harder and we are playing a different game.

Can you give us some insight on GrabbZ’s drafts?

I think GrabbZ’s drafts are… fine… like, in a sh*tty way. Sometimes, we players pleasure a bad draft because we don’t have to play a champion on stage, like it happened with Lee Sin in the past, or Sona, but at the same time, sometimes he takes too much risk in drafts.

He prepares the drafts and we can adapt to them, or we can tell him if it’s sh*t or not, and a lot of the times we have to feed the drafts to him. If we don’t talk about draft we are doomed. He is better than he was in the past, but it’s still a team effort to have a good draft, not just the coach effort.

You mentioned Caps and Perkz being flamed. Do you think the fans perspective matters that much when they don’t know as much as they think about external factors?

No, I think the fan perspective doesn’t really matter. No matter if they had Caps mid lane or Perkz bot lane, and we could still lose two-three games and they would blame it on someone else, maybe me, maybe Mikyx, maybe on Wunder, or I don’t know, whatever they want to blame it on. That’s just how it works and you have to go through criticism and find your way through life, because in the end if we win playoffs, then no one will actually remember what happened in the middle of the split.

Last week I got to talk to GrabbZ and I had asked him about the losses. He told me that you guys don’t really care if you lose a game. Is that true to you, or is that true to him?

I don’t think it’s true. We do care if we lose a game, we f*cking hate losing. *laughs* It’s really annoying to lose, obviously we were memeing about the 18-0, but if we could go 18-0, that’s like, really good you know? We wanted to. It doesn’t really matter in a way that we would get too sad about it, and maybe we will take more stuff out of it, so it’s good to lose, but it’s still really f…… it sucks.

What does losing do to you then? What is it that you feel right after you lose a game?

The feeling is… I kind of want to play again. That’s what sucks about BO1s, you cannot play one more game, right? When I feel like we lost because of silly mistakes, or mistakes that shouldn’t have happened, or we just trolled draft, I feel like we could for sure prove ourselves in another game, but it has to wait until next week, or until the next time we see that team. Other than that, it makes me sad and really, really mad. For sure more mad than sad, because I just want to explode from inside and I just hate life then, for some reason.

Do you ever explode or do you stop yourself?

No, no. We never explode in the team.

Do you bury your face and scream in your pillow sometimes?

Oh, I don’t do that but sometimes, I can’t sleep at night.

Really?

I think it happened before in 2018, at the LEC, back with the old G2 roster. We lost a game because of a silly mistake, so I couldn’t sleep at night, and I went to the LEC with no sleep and I played another game… and then we lost again!!!! *laughs* 

Oh no…

Then I could actually fall asleep because I was too tired.

So how do you get out of the rut?

The first one or two hours after losing are really hard. I think just the next day helps. When you sleep over it, or even if you watch the game and you understand that you actually played well, look at the positive things. You need to think positively and what makes me happy is when we make mistakes and lose, but the mistakes we made happened in scrims as well. So we didn’t lose because of something random, we lost because we made the same mistakes in scrims as we did on stage, so we just have to improve on them. When you lose just randomly… that sucks.

Share some advice with us tilted fans of League of Legends.

Take time off the game to do something else, that helps a lot because you don’t just have your mind on the negative things, like losing solo queue, which I hate as well and I smack my table every time.

Do you really?

Yeah, I do actually. *laughs*

Nice.

Take your mind off of it, view things in a positive manner, or play another game that actually doesn’t make you lose, just a video game you can have fun. Always look at yourself and if you are tilted because your favorite team lost, then you should just try to trust them, and that they can take out stuff from the games they lost. And if you bet money on that game, then it sucks for you. Stop messaging me asking for your money back! *laughs*