More than 1,000 days on from their Masters win in Reykjavik, Sentinels will once again appear in the final of a VCT Global Event. Their 3-1 victory over Paper Rex secured SEN a spot in the Masters Madrid final where they’ll meet the formidable Gen.G.
After the win over PRX, we had the chance to speak to head coach Adam “kaplan” Kaplan, reflecting on the journey to the final and previewing their Gen.G rematch.
Photo by Colin Young-Wolff
Lee Jones (AESA): After winning the opening two maps, what happened in map three on Split for it to go so heavily against you, and…
How did you manage such a decisive turnaround in map four?
kaplan: So for Split, we went in knowing: “Hey, we can be composed here. Make sure we don’t let the pressure get to us”. I kept saying: “What’s the score, guys?” And a couple guys answered wrong. A couple guys like Jordan [Zellsis] answered right: “Zero, zero.”
That’s the correct answer.
Paper Rex can get really excited and get really swingy. So you can grind those games out, we’ve done it before in Korea. And we kind of missed the mark in doing that, executing that, buying into that. I got angry about that. I sounded angry in timeouts where I’m telling them to relax.
The truth as a coach is you’re probably supposed to sound relaxed if you want them to get relaxed, even if you’re angry. And then from there it kind of cascades. In-game mistakes happen, which players get frustrated about. They bottle those in. So part of what happened between map three and four is reiterating:
“Hey, we didn’t buy into that and execute that. We didn’t push each other to stay calm and call each other out when we’re not calm”.
And then another part is dealing with some of the bottling-up and in-game frustrations that the players had. I’m going to give particular kudos to Jordan for that because he really called out players when they weren’t talking and got them to let out their frustrations from the map. And yeah, it was a really, really heated five minutes between map three and four. But it goes to show that that pays off because then we went in, we were calm, we had let it all out and we grinded those guys out.
Credit: Colin Young-Wolff | Riot Games
Lee Jones: Speaking of your anger, there was a clip shown on the broadcast of you slamming your chair during that map.
Is your hand okay and have Riot given you a bill for the damages?
kaplan: Well you know, there’s an Alecks desk Twitter, what about kaplan’s chair? Maybe it’s part of the brand now, the chair’s got to get some love too.
Lee Jones: He walked so you could run?
kaplan: That’s right.
Lee Jones: After yesterday’s game against Gen.G, you said the focus ahead of today was getting good rest after an intense schedule.
Will it be similar tonight ahead of tomorrow’s final?
We’re in an easier spot now because we’ve played Gen.G only a day ago. They haven’t played any more games since we last prepared for them.
So a lot of what we need to do right now is focus on ourselves..
- What did we show today that they can capitalize on?
- What do we need to be self-aware of?
- What do we need to do to improve ourselves as a team strategically?
And then a lot of it is just: “Hey, look how much better we look today from focusing on ourselves on a very out of game level” and just going:
“Okay, we slipped up because of the stakes of an upper final. We really got away from the stakes today. Now we’re going into a grand final and we need to make sure that despite it being a grand final, nothing changes there.”
And that’s really just gonna be the number one focus and get all our attention.
Credit: Colin Young-Wolff | Riot Games
Read also: Gen.G Munchkin - We're not a team that was easy to assemble
How much of a learning experience has this been for you personally, given it’s your first big global event with Sentinels?
There’s been so much learning for me. A lot of things that are unique to international tournaments of this scale that I’ve never dealt with before. It’s been a ton of fun, but it’s been really frustrating at times.
Some big ones are that it’s really a marathon, not a sprint. And it’s my first time personally that I’ve felt like my gas tank has run out at points and that I don’t have it in me and I need to push myself to rally. I’m lucky to have a team, including some veterans, that I can lean on. Today was kind of the first day where I was really tanked and the guys really stepped up, so I owe them that.
Another tough thing is you have to make mistakes, nobody’s perfect, and you have to learn from them. That’s the way life is. But it really, really sucks to make them and lose days off, lose veto advantage, potentially lose your shot at the grand final.
I would say that’s probably the hardest thing; learning to be okay with making mistakes and taking risks despite the stakes.
With Gen.G looking so strong this tournament with their all-Korean roster, do you feel this could be a turning point before Korean sides start dominating the pro scene much like they do in most esports titles?
Yeah, absolutely. I have so much respect for Gen.G and APAC. I’m really proud of Americas as a region; I think we’re the best region when you add up the total skill of all the franchise teams in that region. But I think APAC’s right up there too and I think that Americas and APAC are frankly pretty far ahead of the other two regions in that way.
You can really see them, their teams on stage, they’re very confident, they’re very emotional, they can be really aggressive, and they can really throw you for a loop. But they tend to lean really hard into that and play what I would consider off-meta.
Gen.G is a different beast where they’re showing they’re willing to play really confident, really energetic, throw you off, disrespect you, maybe play what might be considered fundamentally incorrect. But on a macro level and with their comps and their strategies, they’re pretty dialed into playing meta and they can kind of shift gears between two different team identities and that’s a really scary thing. It’s a really hard thing to play against and I have a ton of respect for it.
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