Shan Shao's Diary Day 14 - Anger [Scrim schedules, rivalries, Tabe leaking info]

IG has been eliminated. Today, our entire team watched the games in Group B, hoping they would be able to make it into the top 8.


Looking over our experience in Paris, the number of things Chinese teams need to reevaluate and improve are a lot. There's a lot of deep seeded problems and we're thinking about them constantly. We can't be too disappointed by this experience here. It's not that we don't have the strength or capabilities--it's because we've fallen in our training outside of the stage!


In Group D--LGD's opponents KT, OG, TSM shouldn't be able to defeat LGD. But why did they go 0-4? After the group stages were over, we talked to LGD a couple times. They said to us, "We don't know why our opponents know so much about our strategies. We felt like our picks during scrims and weaknesses were all exposed. Whatever we did, we kept losing."


In Group B--for me, no one should've been able to beat IG. But why did they end up having such a gloomy end? It could be said their strategies ended up not being a secret.


Playing at Worlds isn't easy and it's even more difficult to adjust your players' state of mind. EDG didn't do this well either. We depended on our foundation and our luck picking the groups to make it into the top 8. The second thing is gathering information about our opponents. Once you learn about them in scrims, then you receive a key advantage over them. The third thing is every team in the world right now depends on how motivated their team is. The age of depending on a few key players to carry is over.


After the first group ended, I chatted with IG and LGD's managers and team members. To be honest, we weren't just chatting. We were taking about why they decided they would practice and scrim this way, leading to a very passive performance on stage.


These kind of games depend on teamwork. Korea's teams basically won't train with outside teams--they'll only train a little bit with outside teams. EU/NA teams scrimmed with each other and it seemed as if only Chinese teams didn't want to make appointments to scrim. According to our plans, we hoped that 60-70% of our scrims could go to LPL teams.


But even IG and LGD were worried about bumping into us during the bracket stage. What could we do? They decided to decline our scrims. On our first day, we had an empty time slot and we tried to arrange scrims because we knew there was a lot to prepare for during the group stages. Every team was shooting stuff that day and doing interviews and fan meets. We had conflicting schedules and we also needed to figure out the play styles for the teams in our group.


After thinking it over, the coach ran over to each team's practice room, asking if they had time to scrim. If you go too late, the team you want might already have a scrim lined up for that time. At the same time, we had to have one coach in the room to wait for other teams to come schedule scrims with us. This was the most important part of our preparations. We took our empty slot for scrims and approached IG and LGD's practice rooms.


They returned very quickly. They were free for one time slot, but we weren't able to get it. We understood why, but we felt helpless. IG and LGD seemed like they were hit hard. It was hard for them to win a single game.


Let me tell you a few details. Korean teams were also helping them contact a good Korean food place. We also had Korean players and we went to ask for some contact details for Korean food. They didn't give us any information. But everyone reading this--please don't assume any hostility between the two of us. Even though it's a competition, we're still have a good relationship with each other.


After I expressed my viewpoint, they felt like our tactics in the beginning was a mistake. We should've practiced a lot more. They also scolded me--why didn't you tell us earlier? But from my point of view, it wasn't easy for me to say aloud. Every team has their own way of training; that doesn't mean my way of thinking is right. I hoped they could use their own way to produce good results.


Something happened today with the casters. It's something that made the players and their management incredibly angry. Outside of practicing well and fixing things, we have to make sure that no one can acquire even a little bit of our strategy. It might be tiring to protect all this team information--and it's really hard to control everything. At