BLIX.GG sat down and chatted with Liquid’s Jonathan ‘EliGE’ Jablonowski yesterday morning before the IEM Katowice 2023 Grand Finals.
Sebastian ‘Horizzon’ Lalic, BLIX: Despite your result yesterday (against G2 in the Semi-Final), you’ve had some good results in this event, beating FaZe, Vitality, Spirit, and the upset kings IHC. What is your main takeaway from this event?
Jonathan ‘EliGE’ Jablonowski: “The takeaway from the event is that we had a lot of improvement really quickly. So we’re all really happy about it. We started the year with not the best start, we didn’t have enough practice and we wanted to change our map pool. We weren’t able to do everything in time for BLAST. We actually had a really short turnaround from BLAST until Katowice, so for us to have all those factors playing into the tournament and we were still able to play very well. We had really good individual play as well this tournament, so there are a lot of very good things to take away.’
BLIX: You mentioned the map pool. You guys incorporated Anubis very quickly, and nitr0 spoke about liking it a lot; how is it in your eyes?
EliGE: ‘Anubis has been really fun, map design-wise, it feels a lot better than Vertigo and Ancient when they first came in. You can draw a lot of comparisons to other maps, you can do that with every map, you can draw comparisons and try making it its own. But the style on Anubis just feels more like a CS map compared to Vertigo when it just came out. We enjoyed it immediately and just wanted to play it, it made sense for our map pool at the time, so, overall, we like the map.’
BLIX: With the team evolving, how has your role changed as YEKINDAR is now more incorporated?
EliGE: ‘On CT-sides it hasn’t changed too much, maybe one or two things have changed but really not that much. T-side, I’m a little more passive than before, even compared to back in the day. I’d say that’s the only main change but it’s not anything too substantial.’
BLIX: You guys beat G2 2-0 back in November; since then, they’ve evolved and are now a force. As a competitor, what’s changed on the server when you’re playing them?
EliGE: ‘I think they have really good reads right now. Their individuals are performing the way most people expect them to, they just had to get their confidence back because nothing’s changed lineup-wise. When HooXi joined they were getting owned and they got a lot of crap for it. With some time they were able to get confidence, make sure everyone knows what they’re doing in their system, and now all the individuals are shining really bright. They’re making really good calls and that’s pretty much it.’
BLIX: Finally, let’s talk about North America. The North-American scene finally has some rosters looking like they’re on the up. Do you think the future is bright, or will the scene require some more patience?
EliGE: ‘For our main teams, Complexity, Evil Geniuses, and us, I think we are looking pretty good. In terms of everyone else, I feel like there’s still a really big gap, which is my main concern. I think we are on the up in terms of us at the top. I’m super happy to see Complexity do well, and I’m happy to see EG do well in that one series against Heroic. That was nice to see. I think we’re also playing a lot better. So, as long as we’re seeing steady improvement across the board, it’s really positive.
We haven’t spent too much time in North America, so I haven’t been able to see how the ECL teams are doing and everything like that. Just making sure the pipeline is good, people are learning, and that they’re really motivated to keep grinding to the top, and we’ll have a really nice pipeline for more North American players to make it into the top teams.’
