Gaimin Gladiators’ Quinn: ”We won that game and I was about to have a heart attack. I was sweating from every orifice.”

Despite falling in the upper bracket finals during DreamLeague Season 19, Gaimin Gladiators rebounded in emphatic fashion by taking down TL in the grand finals 3-2 to win the tournament and take home $300,000 of prize money ahead of the ESL One Dota 2 Berlin Major.

Before the reigning DPC Major champions ended the tournament in winning fashion, however, they first had to take down North America’s Shopify Rebellion 2-0 in roughly an hour’s worth of playtime. Even when it seemed they wouldn’t be able to continue their stellar form thanks to their upper bracket finals loss to TL, GG showed their diligence by defeating North America’s Shopify Rebellion in less than an hour total and outlasting TL throughout the full five-game set to come out on top.

Following Gaimin Gladiator’s grand finals win over Liquid, Quinn “Quinn” Callahan spoke to the analyst desk headed by Jorien “Sheever” van der Heijden, Andrew “Jenkins” Jenkins, and Alexandra “Sheepsticked” Roberts, and Ted “Pyrion” Forsyth in a post-match interview regarding how his team rebounded from the previous day to win DreamLeague and more.

This written transcript of the interview was edited for brevity.

GGs for GG

That was an insane grand finals and I know you are a man of many words so I’m just going to give you the floor at the start of this. Is there anything you have to say after that performance?

Quinn: The first thing that comes to mind is Liquid is an insanely good team. For the two games that we lost, they absolutely mopped the floor with us, and for the fourth game, with that crazy comeback, I can’t believe we won that game. It was one of the most stressful games I’ve played in years. We won that game and I was about to have a heart attack. I was sweating from every orifice.

Did you notice that there was an item missing from Insania’s inventory halfway through Game 3?

Quinn: I didn’t notice. I had no idea. It’s the kind of crap that happens in finals. Every once in a while, there’s a team that stomps the other team and it’s not even close, but when it’s close like this, the game morphs–they first-picked Underlord [in Game 5] and you can see there’s a clear progression as to how the game will go. Dota is always a bit weird, especially in Game 5, but just in finals in general.

What was the voice comms like in that final game and those final moments?

Quinn: Either it’s the end of a tournament where you know you’re going to win or just the series in general, the celebratory lap where half of [their] heroes are dead and you have to walk around and hit the base and they can’t do anything, that’s the best part of the game. You know you won and you just get to relish it for a few seconds. That’s a nice period of time.

Compared to Lima, you guys were in separate locations, right?

Quinn: Yeah, you obviously can’t celebrate the same way since some of us fly out tomorrow morning for Berlin. I think Tofu and I will have to pack up right now. It’s not quite the same but it’s always nice to win. It’s nice to show that we weren’t a patch team and we could adapt and change things up even with the game changing by a decent amount. A lot of the stuff that we were good at were tweaked and changed so that’s nice to show as well.

What do you credit your adaption to? Yesterday, you lost to TL 2-0 and it wasn’t close, and for today, you show up and it’s like a whole different team.

Quinn: I think we did learn a lot from yesterday’s games. We got baited by a lot of random stuff and we were in too much of our own heads and we stopped playing Dota in a way, so we tried reigning that back in and played normally. I think we played normal Dota against Shopify, and with against TL, I think we tried to do the same thing. Some of those games were a bit unclean and we had some questionable drafts. I think TL were ahead of us in that series in a lot of ways and we just managed to claw our way back into the series. In some ways, they were ahead of us in terms of understanding some things in the series.

What the hell was that QoP [in Game 4]?

Quinn: I don’t know. That game is not 100% on me, I think. I didn’t play really well, of course, but that game was just hard and the QoP pick was bad but there was some rationale behind it. The rationale wasn’t amazing but it also wasn’t horrific. Yeah, what can you do? I’d argue the Sniper [in Game 2] was worse than the QoP in terms of my impact. It was close. They were both pretty zero so what can you do?

Looking back and looking forward

Who would you say has been the MVP in the tournament?

Quinn: This tournament was really long–it almost felt like DPC–but this series was probably Ace. I think all his play in all the Doom games were really consistent. I think he had a really hard Underlord game and he still had a huge impact on item timing and stuff. I think Ace in general is an extremely consistent player, but honestly, it’s hard to give credit to just one person. All of us were pretty resilient despite having lard lanes and games to be able to pull it back. If anything, giving it to one person is a bit of a disservice.

What are you going to do to reset before the Berlin Major?

Quinn: I’m definitely not going to fast. Exercising is also low on the probability list as I’m sure you can tell. The replays need to be rewatched a bit–that’s not necessarily relaxing but the Major is really coles and some stuff of our gameplay needs to be improved. We’re not qualified to TI through [DPC] points so we need to perform at the Major to go to TI–and also it’s fun to win games. I generally don’t get burnouts so I’m okay, but I’ll probably take the night off, maybe watch the VODs, go to Mickie D’s, or whatever else.

Image Credit: ESL