faveN: "We improved a bit since Cologne"

The German player is happy to have made the XSE Pro League playoffs, but wishes he and his team could have gone further than the quarter-finals in China.

Josef "⁠faveN⁠" Baumann stopped by HLTV's microphone after the quarter-final series that pitted his BIG against PARIVISION at XSE Pro League. He spoke about what went wrong in that series, how he evaluates his team's performance in China, and he looked both back at IEM Cologne, as well as forward to where he sees the team going after the player break.

"Since January, or February, we've been consistently in the top 30, so we'll try to get even further, maybe top 20 or top 15 at the end of the season," faveN told HLTV.

You had a good start against PARIVISION, but the game didn't go your way. What do you think of it? What went wrong?

We had, especially already on Mirage, some good rounds where we knew where to go. In the end, we just didn't kill them, and they also hit insane shots. Especially on Ancient. I think what happened on the CT side... We were coming back, it was 8-7 for us, and we lost every round even though we had good reads.

Like, for example, we stayed B site with three guys, then they came B, and they just killed us. We knew where to go; we just didn't manage to win the round in the end. To keep it short, they just hit better than us.

How do you evaluate your team's performance at this event overall? You made the playoffs, but were eliminated in the quarter-finals. What do you think of it?

It's okay. I would have really liked to at least win this game and be in the semi-final, and also maybe have a shot at the trophy, but in the end, if we look at how we played, we improved a bit since Cologne. We lost against B8 [in Cologne], and beat them here to make the playoffs, so I would say it's okay. We can be happy at the end of the day that we made the playoffs at a million-dollar tournament.

What are your reflections now on the Major? It must have been very sour because it's a German Major and you would want to go as far as you could there. What do you think of your result there?

The Cologne Major was something really special for us. We all wanted to go to the playoffs because it has been like nine years now, or seven years, since a German team was in the playoffs [editor's note: It was eight years], so it's time to start giving the German fans something back. This time it didn't happen. It's really sad. It was heartbreaking for us. At least next year we will try to do better.

Speaking of the future, what do you think are your goals and plans until the end of this season? What do you strive to achieve?

We have a short player break. I don't know exactly how long, but we'll try to reset, get our heads fresh, and we just aim to become better. Now, since January or February, we've been consistently in the top 30, so we'll try to get even further, maybe top 20 or top 15 at the end of the season. We'll just try to improve game by game and set our goals tournament by tournament to see how we're standing and how we play.

Does it really matter, or affect you, that this event is sort of in the middle of the player break?

At the end of the day, I think it's better to have a set player break like we had back then. I needed to rebook my vacation, but this can always happen in CS. Of course, we accepted this invite because it was a really good opportunity to farm VRS points. I think we'll still be positive here, so we should be proud that we accepted this invite and changed our player break to a bit later.