[E3 2014] Entrevistamos a Hai, capitán de Cloud 9

First of all, how are you doing?
I’m doing good. I’m healing from my surgery pretty well. I can’t run or workout but for the most part I’m healing pretty well, so I should be good.

Preparing for this interview, I was checking on your stats and ratios and I noticed your team tend to concede a lot of first bloods. What is your approach in this regard?
Obviously, we don’t want to get first blood or anything. I mean, if we can get it, it’s great but… I don’t know, we just happen to give first blood a lot. It’s not a giant deal and we should stop doing that but you win the game through objectives, kills are helpful but they are not necessary.

It seems that the NA LCS is gaining a lot of popularity and we can see a lot of foreigners in the league. Whats your take on that
I don’t really care for the foreigners coming in, I think that’s fine as long as they like try their best to improve, learn English, whatever… I mean it’s an American thing anyway, there are a lot of different cultures and races in America, so I don’t really care that they are coming over. If they are good and they provide competition, fine; anything that can help us improve as a region is fine. I’m all for it.

Aren’t you worried it might happen something like in the Starcraft scene [where most of the pro-players in the American scene are corean]?
I’m not too worried about that.

After 2 splits dominating the scene, you seem to be off to a rocky start. Teams seem to be gearing up and going face to face with you. Do you feel any pressure?
Pressure doesn’t really matter. We are not playing that well because after my injury, it just take a while to get back to our game and we’ll get there. We are in a rough spot right now but it’s not something we can’t fix.

We’ve seen pictures of you, guys, going out the studio and greeting the fans, even after a loss. What is your relationship with your fans? How important are they?
I think is pretty important to say for example, you have a tough match and you lose, you should head out anyway because a lot of times, people that go there come from different places around the country and they are not always going to be there.

So you should just suck up losing and go out there for your fans, because they are not always going to be there but you always will be, so… losing sucks but having a fun disappointed that he can’t see you sucks more than losing.

Looking at your stats, you tend to play assassins like LeBlanc or Kha’Zix. When you are researching new strategies or new champions, you tend to choose these out of taste or because they are strong in the current meta?
For the most part, champions that are strong are going to be in the meta, for example LeBlanc and Kha’Zix and stuff…

LeBlanc has been a popular champion for a while and something I started to pick up in SoloQ. Kha’Zix is something like, my own kind of champion. It’s not something that is played a lot around the world but I thought it was a good pick.

So I’m always trying to pick champions according to their strengths or as far as what I think it’s good and you get that from SoloQ or from other regions around the world.

Are we going to see Teemo again?
I’m not sure about Teemo, he got nerfed a lot and he hasn’t been buffed recently, as far as for what made him good. He would need buffs in certain areas to make him viable again.

Again, looking at your stats, you have high kill participation so it seems your teammates rely a lot on you. How you deal with this kind of pressure?
I don’t know… I don’t care for the pressure too much. The only pressure I have is from myself to perform and I don’t care if the community thinks I’m playing bad, that doesn’t matter. As long as I’m happy with my overall performance and with my teammates as well, then I’m happy. So the only pressure I get is from myself to perform at my best.

After a year playing at a top level, I guess there are times you, guys, feel frustrated or become saturated and you feel like you don’t want to play. How do you deal with that
You always get frustrated, even in SoloQ games or in LCS games. It’s just the game, so you are always going to get frustrated. It’s just a game and you shouldn’t let it affect your personal life or anything.

It doesn’t matter how you do it: people just play other games, people hang with their friends, people sleep… And whatever you do to deal with stress, just go and do that and remember that it’s just a game.

What is your opinion on the new Summoner’s Rift?
I’m not a fan of the Summoner’s Rift update. I like the art attached and everything about it, it could be a little bit brighter as far as I’m concerned but it looks really cool and I’m happy for what Riot has done.

To wrap it up, seeing the new faces in Dignitas, Amazing coming to TSM, LMQ… Are you afraid of any team, righ now?
I treat every team the same. It doesn’t matter what team it is, they’re all good so there is no reason to be afraid of one team more than another.