ropz on the end of Vitality's win streak: "To be honest we don't care"

The biggest talking point on the first day of the BLAST.tv Austin Major Stage Three, was undoubtedly Legacy putting an end to Vitality's 30-match win streak.

Turns out, however, that Vitality didn't care for the win streak at all, Robin "ropz" Kool told Dust2.us' Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey "Mnmzzz" Moore after Vitality beat Nemiga in round two. According to ropz, the team was focusing more on the Major itself rather than keeping their historic win streak alive.

The full interview is available below on YouTube, with key snippets underneath. All questions and answers below have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

I want to start with the loss to Legacy in the first round, as there's much discussion about the end of your win streak. Do you guys care at all?

No, to be honest, we don't. We've had this every tournament at some point. Everyone was talking about the win streak, everyone was focused on that. We just try to isolate the tournament itself, and this one is the most special and the one that matters the most, so we really try to just focus on every single match on its own, and take it from there.

I think winning or losing, sorry, in the best-of-one, was something that you could feel that's coming because you saw how Falcons were in the previous stage, and it's very sad what happened to them. I think the format is tough, and obviously, we were a bit surprised with how well Legacy played against us. I think they just played a good game, maybe they got lucky with some smoke spams, but props to them. If you beat us, it's a statement itself, so yeah.

Are you someone who generally cares about symbolism and superstition? Things like win streaks, curses, and stuff like that? Are you one of those more superstitious players?

I'm not at the extreme levels of superstition. There's definitely a good balance of doing some stuff always the same, like having the same breakfast or morning routine. You do everything in the same way each time. You always do the huddle at the same time with the whole team. So, that's something that the whole team is part of.

There are small things like that, maybe in the warm-up, each player's routines might be doing some random stuff. But yeah, I don't know, there's a bit of a balance, some things yes, and some things not.

I don't know if you had the chance to read LucasAM's article on HLTV about the curse of IEM Dallas. Every team that won Dallas ended up getting cursed, and something bad happened to them down the road. Do you believe in curses like that?

I don't really believe in this curse. When that kind of stuff happens, it's like the stars aligning. Things happen by chance in my POV. I think it's very unfortunate that teams that have done well in Dallas, have had a rough future after that. I think it's more of a coincidence, that's how I see it. At the end of the day, we play CS and we take a very calculated risk every day in the match, like how we prepare and how we perform. I think it's just a coincidence, maybe, and things happen to go that way.

Maybe Falcons took the curse from you. Are you happy to have those top teams, especially Falcons, out of the tournament, out of your way? Or is it sad to see your rivals struggling?

From a competition aspect, obviously, they are one of the main rivals, and when you don't have to face them, it's like a slight advantage, I would say. We've been having very close games against them so far this year, so it can help us, but we still have to get there. We still have to get to the playoffs, we still have to go to the semifinals or whatever, right? It's yes and no because we've had a lot of success, but at the same time, we lost the BO1 to Legacy, which is very unexpected for our level of play. It's a curse and a blessing at the same time, I guess.