After a tense early game, ahq e-sports Club managed to win against H2K with a fight around the baron pit. With some doubts raised over Taiwan’s chances, especially ahq’s, securing the first win in the group is a good start for the Taiwainese squad. With the help of a translator, Colin “CD Mangaka” Nimer had the chance to speak with Chen “Ziv” Yi about the top lane matchup, Europe’s slow start, and a message for fans back home.  

Colin Nimer: That game looked really close through the early game. Then you won a fight around the Baron pit and you used that to close it out. What specific mistakes did H2K make, in order for you to make that comeback?

Yi: At first they had an advantage, but there wasn’t a drastic gap between the gold leads, so we were able to keep on. Like you mentioned, during that baron fight their positioning was out of place and we punished that to make it back.

CN: This is the second loss to happen to the European region today. G2 was expected to beat CLG and I think more western people had H2K beating you guys. Does Europe look weaker than people expected, or is too early to tell?

Yi: So it’s only the first day of worlds, and some teams are probably not prepared or still shakey on their first day. We still have a lot of series to play, so we’ll see.

CN: So you played Rumble into Odoamne’s Gnar today. That was a classic matchup back in Season 5 with Gnar being played as a counterpick to Rumble. Now that it’s been a year and both of these champions have been changed a lot, do you think the matchup changed at all? You were dueling Odoamne pretty consistently throughout the game.

Yi: So, Gnar got nerfed over these couple patches and Rumble hasn’t. Rumble is really good at pushing lanes early. Gnar can’t really counter that until the mid game. But in a faster pace game like this, Gnar is better in the teamfights.

CN: How did you guys prepare for the World Championships? You guys weren’t looking so good during the regional qualifiers.

Yi: Even though we won the qualifier in LMS, our condition wasn’t so good. We went to Korea mostly for our own condition to put ourselves in the right mindset. We focused on that and trying to find our own meta.

CN: Your own meta showed with the Jinx pick on An. That’s been a classic An pick, before. What made you guys decide on that? You guys were debating between AD carry picks, but why the Jinx? Was it because you had a good frontline for An? Or was it just An feeling like that he would play well on that?

Yi: There’s a reason we left An’s pick for last. We wanted to give him the counterpick, and he was thinking really hard until the last few seconds before he decided on which AD carry to pick. He was debating a few champions, but since he was so good on Jinx last year, he decided to go with that.

CN: You’re here in North America, but you still have a lot of fans back in Taiwan rooting for you. Now that you’ve shown you’re looking good and H2K isn’t looking so well, there’s a chance you can get out of groups. Do you have anything you want to say to the fans back at home watching?

Yi: I want to thank the Taiwanese fans that got up early at 9:00 AM to watch the games. Thankfully we won the first match, and we’ll build up confidence around this match.

(Feature image courtesy of LoL Esports Flickr)