Maden: “We just want to win one tier-one tournament, that's our goal at the moment”

ENCE have gone from strength to strength since adding Maden at the turn of the year, racking up impressive placings at the biggest tournaments and rising up the world rankings.

BLAST Premier Spring Finals represents a chance for ENCE to finally go one step further and pick up a LAN victory, and they started on the right foot with a victory over BIG.

After taking an opening win, which featured two close maps, Maden spoke with HLTV to provide insight on the victory, their expectations for this tournament, and whether or not they can overtake FaZe.

Congratulations on the win. Getting straight to it, Mirage was bizarre. You ran up a huge lead and then struggled to close, having to get it done in overtime. What happened on that T side?

We were trying some things out, some executes and some pops, which didn’t work out. They had a good defence, and this current meta with this silenced M4 is really hard to counter, even if you do a good round you could lose it just because M4s are OP.

What changed, because you got as many T rounds in OT as you did in regulation?

We changed the style, we went for the mid control instead of just going for sites directly like we did in regulation. We went faster towards middle and took that control first, which worked out in the end.

Looking to the next map, you are usually have a very strong T side on Nuke, but BIG limited you to four rounds. Were you confident you could make it work with four?

Yeah, before the Nuke and also in half-time I said to the team that if we take three or four rounds, it doesn’t matter, we will come back on our CT side because we have an insanely good CT side on Nuke. Our rotations are good and also all the individuals are really good, and as I already mentioned the fucking silenced M4 is really hard to play against, so I knew even if we only take four rounds we were gonna win this map.

You mentioned the individuals there, just how important was that Snappi and Spinx 2vs5?

Yeah we were mega hyped after it and momentum went on our side after that round. I think that clutch 1v3 from Spinx was insane, it’s impossible to win, it’s like 1% chance you can win this round, and when he pulled that out we knew it was our lucky stars and we might win this game.

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To talk about the tournament more generally, are you guys starting to feel the pressure now, seeing as you are one of the favourites coming into it?

Nah, I think we actually have less pressure now because we gained experience from these past tournaments, like Dallas and the Major with the crowd an everything, we gained more experience and feel more confident.

We also don’t think about this part, that we are favourites and need to win, we are just playing game by game, and we feel much more relaxed when we are playing now.

Is the goal to win this tournament?

Yeah definitely, our goals are higher than they were a few months ago since we improved really good and our map pool is much better. I think our goal is to win this tournament, especially because there are a lot of teams with stand-ins now, so it’s a bit of a rough situation for other teams. I think we have a good chance winning this.

Obviously there is FaZe Clan, and even NAVI with a stand-in, they are really good teams, but if we just play good that day against them, we can win it.

Thinking longer-term, can you take the #1 spot from FaZe?

I think it’s not easy, they are a really good team and also I don’t think we are thinking about it that much. The rankings don’t matter, we just want to win one tier-one tournament, that’s our goal at the moment. It’s really hard to take the #1 spot from FaZe to be honest.