fitch: "It feels bad when all of the teams rank you next

We spoke to Bektiyar "⁠fitch⁠" Bahytov after his team, AVANGAR, upset NRG to secure their first win at the New Legends Stage of IEM Katowice.

After winning the CIS Minor and advancing through the New Challengers Stage with a 3-1 record, AVANGAR was ranked 15th out of the 16 teams in the New Legends Stage by other participants, with only Complexity considered worse than them.

Due to their low seed, AVANGAR opened the tournament against Liquid and gave the North Americans a run for their money, but couldn't secure the victory. They managed to bounce back, though, and secure a place at the next Major's New Challengers Stage with a win over NRG.

After you went through the last stage, you had a few days off of from official matches. You mentioned in an interview that you are going to be playing DOTA in your free time; so what did you do?

We had one day of full chilling, like a vacation, we did nothing, we played DOTA all day. And for the next two days, we just played practice matches, like six or seven practices in a row, we did that until today.

Coming into this stage, there is the player seeding that comes into it and your team was seeded pretty low, you were rated 15th out of all of the teams. What are your thoughts on that, do you think teams maybe underrated you?

To be honest, I don't know. Only the teams that know us, that played with us, will choose us as a better team. Some of them will probably change their thoughts about us now.

They don't know you well enough so they think you are not that good?

Yeah, the main thing is that they don't know us enough. And it feels bad when all of the teams pick you as the next-to-last team at the Major, I hate it.

You played Liquid in the first match because of that seed, they were second and you were fifteenth. It is a difficult match to start off, what were your thoughts going into that match?

Yesterday, our coach told us that we are going to play Overpass or Inferno. We just watched some demos on those maps because they don't have a lot of demos with Stewie. Overpass is actually a good map for us because we played it a lot before. We were glad to play Overpass against Liquid, but Liquid is Liquid, they are a top-2 team in the world so they know everything and they can always come back, against every team. It was hard to beat them.

You don't sound too disappointed with the loss, it was 16-12?

Yeah, we were close, we lost some crucial rounds against them, that's was why we lost, so we still feel good.

After that, you played another North American team, NRG, again on Overpass. You don't have a lot of time to prepare so you are going in blindly I presume. How does that develop?

First of all, our captain said "come on guys, we don't need to watch demos or something, let's just play our game, our gamestyle, keep doing out plan". That is it. And it worked, I don't know. [laughs] They probably also didn't watch any demos because no one knows who is going to be next.

You managed to close it out, so you are now 1-1, which means you are not going to be at the next Minor, you are already in the next New Challengers Stage...

Sounds great, man!

...How does it feel?

It is nice. It is hard to explain, but when you go back to the Minor there is the whole really long road to come here. Now, even if we lose the next two games we are going to the New Challengers Stage. It sounds good, it is really nice.

Where can you go from here, in this tournament?

I don't know, everything is possible. I hope we will some do something crazy and go through the playoffs, that's it!

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