OG Taiga: “The moment MinD_ContRoL stepped into the arena, he was like ‘I want to play, guys. It’s been a while.’”

While the majority of Dota 2 teams were preparing for the start of the ESL One Berlin Major, OG needed to take care of other things beyond that. Three members of their team—Dmitry “DM” Dorokhin, Evgenii “Chu” Makarov, and head coach Mikhail “Misha” Agatov—saw their application for a visa to get declined.

That led to the team searching for two stand-ins for the start of the Major. These two players eventually became Kartik “Kitrak” Rathi, a former member of Old G and ex-analyst for T1 during The International 11, and Ivan “MinD_ContRoL” Ivanov, a former TI champion who was recently relegated back to Division II in Western Europe alongside Nigma Galaxy.

With that, OG began their third successive DPC Major without fielding a full-strength roster dating back to ESL One Stockholm, where they won with Sebastien “Ceb” Debs as the substitute.

Despite the circumstances surrounding the team, OG looked unfazed by the time Day 1 of the Major wrapped up after defeating Xtreme Gaming (China’s first seed from the Spring Tour) and Team SMG each in 2-0 sets.

With that, OG finds itself at the top of Group B ahead of Shopify Rebellion, Tundra Esports, Beastcoast, and Team Spirit. Though the tournament is still early, people are certainly not counting out a team like OG, who’s renowned for their tendency to come back from dire circumstances, from making a deep run in the Major.

Tommy “Taiga” Le, OG’s Position 4 player, talked to Ted “Pyrion” Forsyth for a post-match interview following his team’s victory over Xtreme Gaming on Day 1 of the Berlin Major.

I believe you guys are at the top of the group at the end of Day 1. That was a nice win [against Xtreme]. How did that feel?

Tommy “Taiga” Le: It feels great. It’s always nice to play in ESL and show up on the first day so I’m looking forward to the second day because we’re probably going to play against harder teams.

I thought it was really nice of you to give a young up-and-coming Div. II player like MinD_ContRoL a shot in your team. How has he been doing so far?

Taiga: He’s been feeling great actually. He has good vibes. He’s excited to play. The moment he stepped into the arena, he was like ‘I want to play, guys. It’s been a while.’ He’s very motivated and it’s nice to see that.

Game 1 [against Xtreme Gaming] looked pretty close, if I may say so. Were you guys worried at any point?

Taiga: Yeah, it was a bit close but I knew if the game went on for too long, I would eventually carry. I had Midas-Aghanim’s ready just in case.

There was a big fight in Game 2 at about 60 minutes with the Diffusal timing on the Pango and you guys never stopped. You just kept fighting. Do you think that’s the way to play Dota on this patch?

Taiga: Not necessarily. I think we just felt it in the moment. BZM just wanted to go fight saying things like ‘I’m going to look for some things to do.’ He was bored of farming creeps and he said he was falling asleep. That’s pretty much it.

In Serbo-Croatian, the word “slȍm” means breakdown or military failture and that’s certainly what happened with the Beastmaster [in Game 2]. You guys didn’t look worried really at any point, did you?

Taiga: No. I think there’s too many things to do in this map and new patch. There’s a lot of things people don’t really know or understand so we can abuse that fact. Both teams [we faced] also didn’t really know so well [about the patch] so we can play based on how we feel about it in the game. There’s not many expectations with us. You come here with two stand-ins, you haven’t practiced the day before, and the patch is [newly] released. We can kind of just play chill.

Image Credit: ESL