Team Liquid has been in the spotlight these days, guaranteed a third spot in TPL, two games away from qualifying to G-1 League and most importantly, invited to The International 3. We caught up with Team Liquid's star off-lane player Sam 'Bulba' Sosale to catch up on how he feels upon knowing his team was invited to TI3, their deep run in G-1 League and also his thoughts on who will be the next invitees.
Alright. In any case, as we all know, the Asian teams pretty much dominated the whole of TI2 last year. Have you been analysing some of their replays from G-1 League qualifiers?
Ya, I watch as many Asian games as I can. I want to see what they do, the movement they make, and how specific players do. YYF and Yao are my two favourite chinese players.
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Referring to the previous question, you mentioned that you always observe what the Asians play. What do you think is the biggest difference between the Asian playstyle and the western? Give us an example if possible.
Maybe a month ago I would say that the Asians were a lot more aggressive than the western teams but recently the western teams are playing more actively. Right now, the biggest difference is lack of mistakes probably. Sometimes, you see a lot of teams do really weird things and the lack of stability in style is also different.
For example, in the western scene, teams were picking Gyro and just stacking camps for the hero a month or two ago. Now teams teams are picking more aggressive trilanes and pushing a lot earlier. Maybe this has to do with hero picks as well. Gyro was considered imbalanced a month ago in the western scene but now teams know how to play against him, kind of like Sven, and Gyro did not even get nerfed.
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I guess this is a big debate now, which team do you think is more worthy of a TI3 invite? EG or Dignitas?
I'd have to say Dignitas. They have been consistent the entired year, showed a lot of hard work and arguable should have been included in the qualifiers last year. They would probably come close to winning it since they were the best team outside of TI2 during that time.
