Ceb at ESL One Birmingham: “There’s Not a Team We Can’t Beat”

Ahead of their lower bracket run at the ESL One Birmingham Major, we got to chat with Sébastien “Ceb” Debs about his experience at the tournament so far, playing with Timado and getting to play comfort heroes.

Sophie: This is the first time we’ve had a Dota Major in Birmingham in 5 years.

How are you finding it?

Ceb: Yeah, I mean, I like it. Obviously, for us, at first, it wasn’t the best memories because that’s when the initial OG team split up. But overall, I actually liked it very much last time, I was around, so I’m happy to be back here.

Sophie: And what about the British food?

Ceb: Yeah, I like it. I mean, honestly, there’s something I just like, in general about the British vibe. I don’t know. I feel comfortable around people here.

Sophie: Yeah, well, that is so good to hear. So you guys did not have a lot of time to prepare for this Major. How did you go from “we’re not qualifying” to “oh, wait, yes we are”.

How did your preparation look?

Ceb: I mean, we knew that there was a slim chance that we might be invited to replace a team because of visa situation since we came second, and we knew that, you know, given the state of the world and some teams just struggle to get visa these days so we knew it was not impossible.

At the same time, we were playing other qualifiers tournaments, so it’s not like we’ve been on a break. We’ve been competing and practicing, but we got the finals heads up like a week ago, so that was, like, a tough time.

We had basically four days of, like, intense practice, because, obviously, how you practice for a tournament like this is a little more narrow than for a long run.

Sophie: In what way?

Ceb: We prepared a little bit more specifically, strategies or tried to narrow a little bit what we would be playing here. Just to build ourselves more, like, a better comfort zone. Does that make sense?

Sophie: Yeah, of course.

Ceb: So we wanted to stick with comfort heroes at the beginning, at least, to get a head start in the tournament, which worked out for us. So, yeah, four or five days of intense preparation. That’s what it was.

Sophie: There is a huge amount of uncontested so far. I think there’s nearly 30 uncontested heroes.

Does that affect your preparation for different series?

Ceb: Well, first of all, I don’t think there’s a valid reason for that. I don’t think the game disallows for teams to pick these heroes. That’s my personal opinion, yeah. I think players just generally prefer to be on comfort and it’s like there’s only a certain amount of practice time that you have.

So if you really practice certain heroes hard, everything becomes very straightforward. You don’t have to think so much about your gameplay, your item builds, how to adapt to matchups, and then you’re actually thinking about how to outplay your opponents. And like all your brainpower kind of goes into how do I win this game? How can I make the difference?

Whereas when you’re put on a hero you haven’t had as much experience with before, some of that thinking has to be done on like what is the optimal way to play that hero in that situation. At the end of the day, it’s a player profile thing and also their connection to the game and their instincts.

Some players like to kind of really know what they’re doing. That’s how they feel good. And some players are more like creative and they get more excited about kind of figuring things on the spot and surprising opponents. It’s different styles, I think, but most players right now are more of the conservative kind of.

If you know people are picking conservatively, does that affect your bans?

Ceb: Yeah, it does. And I think that’s also the downside of being like that. Like, people know what to expect from you. And then some players underestimate you if you were to be a little bit like creative and think out of the box.

Sure it’s a little bit harder for you, but it’s also much tougher for your opponents because they have no idea what’s going on and they don’t really know what to counter you.

You still have players like Topson for instance. I think he’s obviously on the creative side of things, which makes it hard to play against him for some teams because they, you know, like yesterday he bust out Clinkz mid in the first game and I’m sure they have no idea what’s gonna happen, what to do, what is he gonna build.

And then you have players like Ammar, for instance. That’s like, you know what’s coming. You have to get ready for it, but he’s so good on it that it might not be enough. Even though you’re prepared, different styles.

Sophie: That’s exactly it. And I wanted to talk a little about how you feel going from not qualifying to 2-0’ing Xtreme, who just came off the back of a win.

How does that affect your mental when you’re preparing the team for a game?

Ceb: I mean, honestly speaking, we weren’t surprised when we took Xtreme. I’m not saying we’re the better team but we know that when we perform, we don’t feel like there’s a team that is out of reach for us. We have felt like that at the beginning of the team, for instance, I wouldn’t be saying that a few months ago, but right now we know that.

On a good day for us, there’s not a team we can’t beat. And I think we’ve beaten at least every team here so far. We took at least one map from every team so far, and we’ve met almost all the teams in the tournament.

So it didn’t surprise us. Obviously, we went from not qualifying to topping the group and that was a surprise in a sense. That was unexpected. We’re really happy about it and we’re grateful for that in a way and we’re looking to make the most of it.

I mean, but to be fair, you know, we’ve been losing to Tundra a lot in these qualifiers, and they look to be be one of the strongest teams in this tournament so far. And I would put this tournament above any qualifier or any online tournament. Like, this is when you really get to see what teams are made of. And right now, it seems Tundra are the strongest team.

Sophie: Just one last question for you about playing with Timado.

How has he been fitting into the team?

Ceb: He’s fitting great. I mean, he’s very easy to fit. He’s funny, he’s enjoyable to be around. He’s kind. I don’t know, he’s just, like a nice person, nice teammate. He’s very well spoken, which he’s better at putting words on things than most players. So that’s like a bonus that we didn’t expect.

So it’s very easy to communicate with him or to understand what he means, and for him to also, you know, kind of understand what you mean and get a conversation going also, in that sense. Everything has been great, honestly.

We got much more than just a really good carry. We got a really good teammate and a nice person to hang out with.

There’s the Spanish aspect, which I think makes Wisper much more comfortable also. So, no, everything has been great, honestly. We’re super happy to have him.