Maden on Spinx's performance against HEET: "The things he does on LAN are insane"

Pavle "⁠Maden⁠" Bošković has now spent a few months with ENCE, and he's confident about the squad's ability to successfully go 3-1 at the RMR.

ENCE's run at the European RMR has seen a bit of everything, starting with a solid win over Spirit, before meeting their first obstacle against a rapidly improving Astralis. ENCE's 1-1 match against HEET saw Lotan "⁠Spinx⁠" Giladi go nuclear, dropping 40 frags in regulation as they dominated the Frenchmen 16-8 on Ancient.

Following their comfortable victory against Alexandre "⁠bodyy⁠" Pianaro and company, the European mix can now look at their 2-1 record in Romania with confidence. Maden, the newest member of the squad, caught up with us after the game to talk about ENCE's run and his time with them.

You are 2-1 now, did you expect the event to be going like this for you, or were you hoping for more because of the form you have been carrying?

I mean, it's always rough in best-of ones. We thought that we could go through the event 3-0, but it is how it is with this BO1 format, especially if you lose both pistol rounds and everything. This was the case against Astralis, and it was a very tough match. Our T side on Overpass was really bad, but now we are 2-1 and really close to qualifying anyways. So yeah, BO1s are always really rough.

What was the problem on the T side of Overpass against Astralis?

It was a slow start at the beginning, we had a lot of misunderstandings mid-round. Also at 3-3, we lost our economy when they were full eco and blameF had a hero M4 when we did the B rush, and he just killed us all. It was a bit rough and our economy went totally down the drain after that.

It took a while to get going and once you thought you were coming back, your run was cut short. How do you recover after a game like that?

Well it was hard coming back on the T side after it [B rush on round 7] because our economy was in a really bad situation and there was also the round where hades and Spinx were saving guns but died after time, so our economy was just totally shit for the whole game. We tried to recover on the CT side even though we did not win the pistol round, but we knew that if we won four or five rounds on the T side, we could easily come back on the defense. Unfortunately, they had taken too many rounds from their CT side so it was really hard to come back.

You come in today after a much better game against HEET. Spinx was on fire today, dropping 40 frags. What happened? Did he have a train to catch or something?

I mean he's pretty insane. He's very good individually and the things he does on LAN are insane. He usually plays on 70 ping in Israel which sometimes makes it a bit harder for him online, but as soon as he comes on LAN he hits some insane shots on pistol rounds, gun rounds, and everything. He's a very good player overall and it's really nice to play with him and have him on the team.

Now you've been with ENCE for three months, getting more comfortable at every event. How has been the experience for you during this time?

I think I've learned a lot. This is just my second professional team, and I've gained so much experience in the last three months. The atmosphere is really great and I just love playing with the guys, and even when we lose, we bounce back really fast and don't tilt at each other. So yeah, the atmosphere is really good at the moment.

So how has it been working under Snappi so far?

Working with him is very easy, he's a very open-minded guy and likes to listen to every idea from the players and make a structure around them for rounds. He makes every player feel confident in the team and tries to make everyone do things they like around the map, so it's really nice to have him on the team as an in-game leader.

You talked about ENCE's confidence to 3-0, is now the 3-1 a must-do objective for the team?

Yeah we have to go 3-1. I am not exactly sure who our next opponent will be as we are waiting for other results to happen. We would now like to go 3-1, our main goal was to qualify for the Major and after that, we will see. At EPL we just took it game by game, trying to go as far as we can, and we'll do the same here.

Speaking of that EPL run, you managed to get to the final. It was obviously a difficult match, but what were you able to gain from that experience?

We leaned a lot. I think we got a lot of fun experience, playing a lot of games in a LAN environment. We were able to review our demos against FaZe, we saw a lot of mistakes that we did and could improve on, so it helped us a lot.