floppy: "We're definitely seeing the progress for future events"

Ricky "⁠floppy⁠" Kemery spoke to HLTV.org after their match against Permitta, which puts Complexity one win away from the IEM Katowice group stage.

Complexity entered IEM Katowice after an unsuccessful BLAST Premier Spring Groups campaign, where they lost the deciding series against Natus Vincere despite being 14-8 up on the final map. Keen to make amends for their failure, they began IEM Katowice with a match against BIG. The North Americans got bested on Anubis in a close game, which condemned them to the lower bracket.

Their lower-bracket opponents were Permitta, who ended up being no match for Complexity. The North Americans ran rampant against the Poles in a quick 2-0, with a win against ENCE all that now stands between them and a spot at the main event.

Ahead of the all-deciding match, floppy spoke to HLTV.org about Complexity's season so far and their expectations for Friday's clash with ENCE.

The American also touched on the situation that happened early in the match against BIG, in a round where he dropped out of the game and which did not end up being replayed, and how it affected the proceedings.

I wanted to go back to BLAST, where you had that heartbreaking loss to NAVI at the end, barely missing out on the Finals after being up 14-8 on the last map. How do you reflect on that? That must be a tough loss to recover from.

Yeah, it was definitely rough for us as a team, but it's not the first time it happened considering the RMR, so I kinda got flashbacks to that considering it was the third map of Overpass again. Honestly, it sucks, but it is what it is.

Considering as you say this isn't the first time, do you sense there is a pressure issue there in terms of how the team is able to deal with that?

Not for me, personally. I think NAVI are just experienced enough to adapt to what we were doing. It's obviously a choke, we're up 14-8, so I think it was a combination of them adapting and us having a bit of nerves. I wasn't really feeling it that game, personally.

How much did you see that as a positive sign going into Katowice, being able to take a team like that to such a close score and being in a position to beat them?

We finally won Inferno, thank god. We were so sick of losing on Inferno, so we put in a lot of work to get better at it, and to beat a team like NAVI on it is obviously really good. We're definitely seeing the progress for future events as well.

Tell me about Katowice and how things have gone for you so far. You started off with that close, almost-comeback against BIG, now a convincing win against Permitta. How are you feeling about your performances up to now?

I think the BIG game could have been a little bit different considering what happened in the first half. We had to take a tech pause and it couldn't happen, so it was pretty much like a 3v5 at the start of the round, which is a really big turnaround for us. We've been working on our CT side after that as well, we've learned a lot from the BIG game, so we're just going to watch this Permitta game and see what we can do better for tomorrow.

Is that something that affects you mentally inside the game when an issue happens that isn't supposed to?

Obviously it sucks, but it's out of my control, it's out of anyone's control, it's not really something to get upset about. I mean, I can't do anything about it, so it's like, whatever, it is what it is. Obviously it sucks.

ENCE is going to be the matchup for a spot in groups. It's a team you've beaten before in the run you had at EPL S16, how confident are you that you can repeat it here?

We're gonna try our best to get a quick 2-0 going. We wanna qualify for the main event in Katowice. We practiced them in scrims before and we've had good results against them - obviously it doesn't really matter too much, but I think we're gonna have a good game.

What is the goal for this event? How important is it to get a good result here after you just missed out on the BLAST Finals?

It's pretty important, especially after that BLAST choke, I'll say. We wanna make the main event for sure, that's pretty much one of our main goals for tomorrow, just beat ENCE and move forward from there.