In a winner's interview at DreamLeague Season 19, Gaimin Gladiators' Off-laner Marcus "Ace" Hoelgaard gives his thoughts about his role-swap, what's his preferred playstyle and his hobbies outside of Dota. Gaimin Gladiators beat OG in a close 2-1 series and comfortably share the first place of the second Group Stage with Team Liquid. How are you enjoying off-laning as we look at the final 24h of this patch? Do you miss being the blink initiators or do you like this "aura, you can't kill me, you guys suck" kind of thing? I see myself as pretty versatile. I feel like I just kind of like to win so, whatever is I think good is good in the patch, I will play. I think, overall, I am more of an "aura" guy, but I can play blink too, or even some carry off-lane. Do you have an example? You want your Meepo to be an off-lane hero? There are some patches in which the off-lane can farm a lot. Off-lane Meepo? I think that would be cool, some day it will happen, I think.

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Read: Aramis talks about standing in for Tundra at DreamLeague Season 19

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  Is there one particular thing that you feel like once you've understand, or once someone told you, it help you elevate [your play] a lot.  I moved from carry to off-lane, right? [The game's] a lot different there. When I [made the move] I was naturally just thinking of my own game a lot, but, I'm not sure if anybody told me, I just kind of realized that this off-lane playstyle is more about enabling your team, rather than just thinking about your own game. But I have something recent, actually. I was talking with Quinn randomly, and he said something that I think he heard from SumaiL, about csing and how important it is to cs well and [that] the most skilled player is the one who [can] cs better. I took that to heart a lot. It sounds like a very simple thing, but I feel like I improved a lot when I put more thought on how important it is. Is it the [idea] that you need to make your enemy work for every last-hit and how you posture yourself? Yes, especially in side-lane, because in mid this is already very [engrained], that it is really important to get all the cs and deny as much as you can, but I feel like a lot of people are slacking in the side-lanes on that stuff. I feel like they don't understand how important it is.  

(Credit: Gaimin Gladiators)

  In that last game you were mega out-csing DM, but on the opposite perspective your carry [dyrachyo] was dying repeatedly, [yet] you were having such a good game, way above anybody else. Did you have to calm him?  Yeah, I was constantly saying "Venom cannot lane at all, he is getting nada, he can't even get XP", since I could see that dyrachyo was dying a bit. I was also constantly like thinking and talking [about] how I could give him [some help], and I was just thought "I'll buy the usual Vanguard and I'll go bottom and he can go Top. Now I have a Vanguard and their tri-lane kind of just have to run from me, so he can now free farm Top. What do you get up to outside of Dota? Lately there's been Dota every day for so many days, so lately it's just been straight up Dota only. Normally I like to do some sports, I go [out] together with my brother Link a lot, we play some board-games and just chill and hangout. Besides that, I go out with my friends and do some sports sometimes. Can you tell me one good board-game you've played lately? Lately we've been playing a lot of Dominion, that's been fun. We often times talk to Tofu, and he talks about how you guys duo-queue. But, I was told by CY that his introduction to this team was because he was originally friends with you, so why does CY never get invited to this stack? Because you cannot triple-queue, sadly. You just cannot find games. If we could triple-queue, I'm sure we would, but [at the moment] we would just queue forever. But your Duo-queue performances have been very satisfying I imagine, with just Tofu? Yeah, it's always pretty chill. I barely do any solo-queue anymore, if I'm queueing it's usually with duo, with supports.

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