Aurora are through to the StarSeries Fall grand final after beating favorites Vitality in the upper bracket final, and thus avoid a double-header on Championship Sunday, which will feature the Consolidation Final and Grand Final on the same day.
We caught up with Jimpphat after the upper bracket final to hear from him after he posted a series-high 1.36 rating, helping lead Aurora to victory and build upon the wins against Natus Vincere and NRG in the first rounds of the tournament.
So to start off, when you got here, you beat NAVI, and it was a first big LAN win, but then we saw how NAVI went out... Now you did it against Vitality, and maybe it's not prime Vitality, but still, very highly ranked and a very good team filled with talent. So tell me what it's like for you to get this huge victory here.
Definitely, it means a lot. We have played a lot of good CS in practice. But we have also, in the tournaments... we always fell a little bit short so far, but it's also reasonable because we are still such a new team, so we are not expecting ourselves to beat every top team no matter how good we have played in practice or whatever because it's a totally different game. So now we came here, and we feel really confident.
Obviously, it would be a really good tournament to win for all of the VRS points and whatever, for the invites for Hong Kong and all this stuff, for the Major. So we really tried our best to prepare for this tournament, and I felt like we also managed to do it. And now beating Vitality is a huge win, maybe they are not the prime, but they are still one of the best teams in the world, arguably, nobody can say otherwise. So it's a really good win, and we won also quite confidently. I would say Inferno was a little bit tight, but then the rest I think we played really, really good.
Yeah, and I noticed ash talked to you a little bit after the game, saying, 'Oh, you're really feeling it today.' What exactly was he talking about there?
So basically, he was just saying that I was playing really active. I was lurking really aggressive, getting a lot of entry frags, and whenever we fell down to 4v5, I always tried to convert and get a kill. On Nuke, for example, I always try to get kills from Door and Hut and Mid, whatever. That's what I like. For me, it's important that I play really aggressively because that's when I play the best.
Obviously, you cannot always do it if you don't feel the game, but I think recently I've just had such a crazy amount of confidence. I want to go for every duel I can, and especially versus Vitality — they are such a strong team. They play really good team CS, and also individually, of course, they are good, but you need to be fearless versus them. You cannot think that, 'Oh, they are so much better than me individually, they are a better team.' You will instantly lose at that point.
So you just need to play fearless and not care who you are taking the aim duel against; you just go for it and shoot. That's what I was doing, trying to play as aggressively as I could, and I think it worked out really well. It's something I've been working on for a while already, so I want to keep it up because obviously so far it's been good results, so it's looking good. But yeah, just playing really confidently.
And one of the things you talked about in the past was kind of the mentality on the team, and how you would sometimes lose to yourselves. How would you describe what changed now, what changed today?
I think the whole topic is more about us as a whole team. After we played in Copenhagen for BLAST Porto recently, when we lost to G2, we had a really big team talk after because even though we played decent, there were so many mistakes that if we kept doing the same stuff, we definitely wouldn't beat a team today like Vitality, as an example, because it was just really bad.
As a team we just agreed, 'Okay, we need to be better,' because we know the potential of this lineup. We know how good we can be. Obviously, it's too early to say, we are still a fairly new team and all this stuff, but it's looking [like there's] really potential with all the players we have on the team.
Individually, I just talk a lot with ash. He's really helping me out behind the scenes; we are working together and talking a lot about CS and about certain moves and how to also be mentally on the game when it's needed. Especially in the important games. So I've been working on myself with ash and also by myself, and it's been good results, obviously, so I want to keep it going.
But at the same time, I know you cannot always play your best, so there will always be some bad games coming as well. But for right now, I just want to use this momentum I have in a way in this tournament, especially. Hopefully, whoever we will play in the final, we can keep doing it and not go kind of back to our old selves, what we saw in the past tournaments.
I just want to play as a new Aurora and show how good we can actually be in the really important game, obviously the final. So we want to do our best and see where it takes us, and then take every learning after that from this tournament and then move on again and again.
Yeah, and this tournament is a little bit particular in that the final day is actually going to have two finals, the consolidation final and then the grand final. How big is it for you to not have to play that first match tomorrow? Is it best of five or best of three?
It's definitely, definitely huge impact, because in a way you can be warmed up after the game when you play two games, but at the same time you need to understand that it's really exhausting mentally if you do that. It's kind of hard to be fully focused whenever it's a best-of-three into a best-of-five. So let's say you go 2-1 in the best of three, and then you play best of five, and it's a really close game...
I think in that situation we have the upper hand because we should have more energy, but still I think it's overall good. We can do more preparation; we have time to chill and also look at the enemy, who we will see, who it will be, and then prepare and hopefully come again fired up on the server, because also in all these past games, even though we didn't have much time to practice or anything, we were really fired up from the start, from the get-go, and it's also one big key thing why we have been doing really well in this tournament. So hopefully we can also bring it to the final.
And if Vitality can make it through tomorrow, how would you see playing them in a best of five?
Obviously it will be tougher, and also for them I think it's the favorite to come out to the final against us in a way. So if we played them tomorrow, this win wouldn't matter at all, because then we need to beat them again, and that's the important game; that's the game where we see who is actually the better team.
But yeah, I would say they are the favorites, coming from the lower bracket I think, or from the consolidation final. But yeah, whoever it will be, I think just today alone it will give us a lot of confidence, because we showed that we can actually beat a really good, a really top team. So it makes us feel a lot more confident and really good.
NRG
Nick 'nitr0' Cannella
Aran 'Sonic' Groesbeek
Håkon 'hallzerk' Fjærli
Michael 'Grim' Wince
Jeorge 'Jeorge' Endicott
Damian 'daps' Steele
Jimi 'Jimpphat' SaloPast 3 months
Vitality
Dan 'apEX' Madesclaire
Robin 'ropz' Kool
Mathieu 'ZywOo' Herbaut
Shahar 'flameZ' Shushan
William 'mezii' Merriman
Rémy 'XTQZZZ' Quoniam
Natus Vincere
Aleksi 'Aleksib' Virolainen
Mihai 'iM' Ivan
Valeriy 'b1t' Vakhovskiy
Ihor 'w0nderful' Zhdanov
Drin 'makazze' Shaqiri
Andrey 'B1ad3' Gorodenskiy
Aurora
Ismailcan 'XANTARES' Dörtkardeş
Özgür 'woxic' Eker
Jimi 'Jimpphat' Salo
Damjan 'kyxsan' Stoilkovski
Ali 'Wicadia' Haydar Yalçın
Ashley 'ash' Battye