KOI Starxo: “Players that we actually wanted just went to the other teams”

Movistar KOI earned victories over BBL Esports and Team Liquid and staved off early elimination from the VCT EMEA Kickoff. They fumbled in the play-in versus Vitality and KCorp, but showed a lot of promise with the roster.

Lee Jones spoke to team captain Patryk “starxo” Kopczyński between their duels.

Lee Jones: These are the first games with your complete roster after the lineup was finalized later than most teams.

How are you finding the new lineup?

Yeah, so far so happy. Didn’t expect that we would play so good after only like a month of practice. I thought the boys will get a bit more pressure into them, but they feel super good because of the atmosphere we have in the team. We’re super friendly and stuff. So I feel they just feel at home when we play and that’s super great, only positive.

Lee Jones: A loss today would’ve seen you eliminated, followed by a month and a half without another match, after only playing two series.

Would you like to see a busier competitive schedule?

starxo: I mean, obviously I think everyone would prefer to play more and more because that’s what we work for, right?

We work for playing on the stage and that’s what we live for. So we want to play more and more. Like in CS — I don’t know if I can talk about this — they have tournaments every week, you know, this is something I think people love to watch and love to play.

There’s still competition, not only a few games a year obviously. If you qualify to everything then you have tons of games but if you manage to lose one or two you’re out. So obviously we would love to play a bit more but we’re happy to be here.

How were you keeping busy during the off season?

starxo: We’ve been trialling most of the time. We had some break after the LCQ, but we jumped straight into the trials for the team. It took a lot of time because a lot of players that we actually wanted just went to the other teams.

So we had to switch it up and do even more trials because we thought we’re gonna get them but we didn’t get them. But then we had one more change of the player that we didn’t expect to do and from January we started practicing fully with the full support from the organization.

So far so good, everything looks super good, the support, and I think it’s just a matter of time before we will start getting better and better.

Credit: @MovistarKOI | X

What would you see as a successful 2024 for KOI and also for you personally?

starxo: Obviously qualifying for every tournament possible, that’s probably the dream for everyone. But the real goal is for me to just keep the consistency, to not always be in the bottom, like the losers.

We want to compete with the best, we want to fix our mistakes, we want to be professional and we want to be able to compete with the top. Even if we lose. For me I can lose every game, if it’s head-to-head every map, we can lose 12-14 every map, then we can see that we actually can fight, we just have small mistakes to fix.

The goal for me personally is to become a better player and keep the consistency because I had a lot of problems with consistency last year. And just to be playing the best teams in the middle of the season when we get enough time to fix all mistakes and learn everything.

Lee Jones: Icebox has returned to the map pool and teams have tried varying comps on it so far, and you guys had a close game with TL.

Do you feel you have a decent read on the map?

I think Icebox, for us, is really good. It didn’t change a lot, right? So it’s kind of the same like three years ago or whenever they deleted the map.

The meta kind of didn’t change, it’s just that teams are just more flexible in the compositions they play. But the way of playing it is kind of the same patterns — the same meta of playing — and I think it’s pretty good for us so far.