Hyukkyu “Deft” Kim “Jinxing? Meaningless in front of a ‘solid team'”
Diflus Kia’s Kim “Deft” Hyuk-kyu talks about overcoming their “nemesis” T1.
DPL Kia defeated T1 2-0 in the sixth week of the regular season of the 2023 LoL Champions Korea (LCK) Summer League at the LCK Arena in Jongno-gu, Seoul on Saturday. The victory ended an eight-game losing streak against T1. With a record of 8-4 (+7), the team is now in third place.
“T1 was an opponent that the players and coaches wanted to beat very badly,” said Kim Hyuk-kyu in a post-match interview with Kookmin Ilbo. He attributed the victory to his team’s more thorough ban-pick preparation, which included the Azir sniper ban and the new weapon Yone pick. Here’s our one-on-one with him
-On settling the score with T1.
“It’s an opponent that all the players really wanted to beat. I’m really happy. If you look at the game, there’s a lot of feedback. But if you look back at the games we lost to T1, there were a lot of points where we could have won, but we kept losing. Today we won, so I’m happy with that.”
-How did you prepare for today’s match?
“We had a longer banquet meeting than before. The coaching staff and the players wanted to win this match so badly. In game one, I think we got a lot of banpick advantage by banning Azir. Normally, we prefer a banpick that looks at the big picture and completes our compositions more than a sniper ban. Today, I think the snipe ban on their mid laner worked well. Our compositions were more complete.
In the second set, we picked up a yone that we hadn’t played before. ‘Showmaker’ Heo-soo prepared well in practice. It’s positive that we can now confidently pull out weapons we haven’t used in practice.
Losing back-to-back games to strong teams can be due to the difference in skill between the two teams, but it can also be due to the vague feeling of ‘Oh, I can’t win against them’. I’m glad we were able to get rid of that negativity with the win.”
-You were disappointed that you weren’t able to close out the match quickly in the second set.
“I think we could have ended the game quicker if we had used Sejuani’s ultimate in front of the Nexus to keep Jaya alive and forking with Kaisa’s Voidstalker (W). We took a total of three breaks throughout the game, as players got greedy and tried to do more.
It’s okay to make your first mistake. You’re going to make mistakes in a game. But after that mistake, it’s important to have a quick feedback loop within the team. We need to prevent similar mistakes from happening in the future 메이저사이트.”
-Kim, a veteran, did you have any special advice for your teammates before the game?
“I didn’t say anything special. They were all confident that they could win today. In my experience, personal jinxes don’t matter when you’re a complete team. I have players I don’t play well against, players who are difficult to play against. But in my experience, if we’re a solid team, a complete team, we can make all that stuff irrelevant.”
-KT Rolster, who is next up against second-place KT Rolster with a 10-1 record.
“KT and Genji have the best meta understanding and in-game performance right now. To beat them, you can’t make mistakes in favorable situations like today. You can’t give them a chance to catch up. We’re happy to win today, but we need to go back home and get enough feedback so we can beat KT. The good performance of both teams is based on their banfic. We need to be able to break them banfic-wise.”
-On what it means for both teams to be good at banpicking.
“Even with the same champions, there are good picks on blue and good picks on red. Kaisa is a pick that gives up lane initiative, but if you pick her and you want to keep the game alive until the mid game, you need to banpick so that you can take initiative in other lanes. Alternatively, you need to design ganks in the early and mid game to get through the crunch. KT and Genji are good at that. Maybe in the next game, Kaisa will be the key.”