M80's Preparation Going Into The Shanghai Major

Without Mario, reck managed to help his team secure a top-eight finish in ESL Pro League 20, and retained their ESL Challenger NA title. Now, M80 enters the Americas RMR as the fifth highest-ranked team with seven Major slots on offer. Ahead of their first match, the anchor-lurker sat down with HLTV to talk about the RMR and their plans ahead.

Given that this was reck’s first interview with HLTV, he was asked to describe his journey so far and what pushed him to make it here, to which reck said

When I first started the game I just developed a drive. Initially, just for fun like everyone else, but I started really getting into the game and putting in a lot of hours just by purely enjoying it. At age 14, I thought, 'this game is really fun,' and started competing in ESEA Open, Main, then Advanced, then MDL. Once I hit MDL, I realized there was a lot of potential. I went off the feeling of enjoying the game, and then realized I could be competing and chased that ever since.

Back in the day, Rank S really made that stuff fun when you got to see pros playing against each other, steel, swag, all those OGs. Watching them play was fun and I always wanted to get to that level after watching them play.

When asked about how he feels coming into the RMR, especially after playing through the Thunderpick World Championship, reck said

Yeah, we feel very prepared. We had two weeks, about 14 days, to prepare and we were just going over our stuff, and building new stuff for this tournament, and everything went smoothly. We had a rough patch at the start but that's usually how it goes when you're learning new stuff. We feel prepared and confident.

Our result [at Thunderpick] definitely sucked, but the style of their team was hard to play against. Put us against other teams, and we wouldn't have performed like that. We had a rough meeting with them, learning how they play. They're a very strat-heavy team and just how they were playing, how fast they were playing, all the fakes and stuff, so we had to go back to the drawing board and review what we did wrong.

It should have turned out better but we were not playing our A game. That's what we had the bootcamp for, and right after that event we started, so it gave us more time to prepare, if anything.

When asked about how the arena feels, despite the complaints some people have been circulating around, reck said

I saw people complaining about the desk height, I didn't see the whole thing but I saw slaxz-'s tweet, and I kind of agree with him. I don't think anything is wrong. The PCs are running really well. The monitors are obviously different but we were on different monitors anyway because we were at the Vitality bootcamp before this, and they had the AGON monitors. Not 540 Hz, but the monitor is different and the colors are different because of the different monitor. But I don't think it makes a drastic difference.

In terms of the desk, not having changeable heights, I think that's whatever, it's a practice room right? It's all minuscule to the big thing, especially because it's just a practice room. I don't know what other complaints were made, but the desk height and monitors at least.

When asked about his unique role on M80 as a specialist-anchor, which we don’t see quite much in North America, reck said

M80 was my first team where I was really solidifying myself in that role. ATK, I was kind of getting there and those were my two big teams. Before that, it was just PUG teams. I don't really know how I fell into that role, I think one of my teammates suggested it and I started picking up roles that applied to that. It's just fun, I guess, just anchoring a site and making it yours.

In terms of lurking now, again, it fell into my nature, the way I play. I don't know how I fell into the role to be completely honest but M80 was definitely the start of realising, 'I'm an anchor-lurker,' and I've been developing myself every since, and I'm loving it right now.

When asked about his upcoming game against BOSS and how the team feels going into it without malbsMD, reck said

We all feel confident, for sure. We all come here knowing that we can, it's just going to depend on our performance. In terms of losing malbs for Lake, Lake has been an awesome substitute. He's been learning, he meshes with the team really well. We're not even looking at ourselves like we're minus malbs, that's not really a thing anymore. We recreated ourselves plus Lake and what he needs, in terms of evolving and being as good as he can. We're all confident in what we have right now.