Before FNATIC, FaZe defeated Falcons, Cloud9 and lost to Vitality, maintaining a solid 3-1 win/loss ratio, earning them a qualifying spot for the Perfect World Shanghai Major. FaZe’s star player, Håvard "rain" Nygaard, has been phenomenal across the tournament and is partly the reason why FaZe qualified. He sat down with HLTV after the win over FNATIC to discuss what’s next.
When asked about what it feels like to qualify despite having played against so many tough teams, rain said
In the end, it's just the RMR. It's just another qualifier, and I feel like we were one of the favorites coming to qualify. It feels good to actually do it and do it in the fashion we did. We had a slightly rough loss against Vitality but I think we figured out what's wrong, and we have solutions for it.
It shows that what we're working on is going in the right direction, for sure. It's just about not having the slow starts and figuring out how to be more in it from the start, especially versus Vitality. Because if you're not there from the start, they're going to take advantage of it. It's just about getting a head start versus the better teams.
When asked about the boot camp FaZe will be having in Europe for the purpose of preparing for the Shanghai Major, rain said
I think there are still just better teams in Europe. I don't know if you're going to be able to book all your days [with practice] here, I don't know how it's going to be with the schedule. I think people wanted to go home and relax a little bit and not spend that much time in China, but of course, it could backfire a little bit with the jet lag. We'll see about that. But I think we planned it very well with the travel time and the days we come back here as well, so it should be fine.
If we go to the Elimination Stage, then it would be good because we would get to have like a six-day bootcamp, so we can do extra work. If we end up in the Opening Stage, it's fine as well, it doesn't really matter. We will take the group stage as a bootcamp. [smiles]
When asked about his form at IEM Rio and how he’s improved so much from then, rain said
It's just about working harder. I've been putting more hours into focusing on myself and making sure I don't miss the kills that I should be getting. During the RMR here, I've been getting the kills that I normally get, and I was doing pretty okay. So I've just got to keep working and hopefully keep it up for the Major.
Towards the end, when asked about how much the Shanghai Major means to him and how solid of a chance FaZe has at winning it, rain said
Every tournament we go into we feel like we have a chance. I feel like the games we lost against the best teams have been close on our end after rewatching, and even though we lost the games, it feels like it could have gone either way in most of the rounds. We know we're close, we just haven't reached our full potential yet and haven't managed to close out those clutch rounds that FaZe is known for.
It's very important. Our season has been very lackluster. The Major loss in the final, and our only win was Chengdu. It's been very lackluster and I think we definitely need a good end to the year.
