ACHES: “This tournament has had every test it possibly could’ve”

Evil Geniuses are headed to the grand finals of the 2018 Call of Duty World League Championship. 

Patrick “ACHES” Price, Bryan “Apathy” Zhelyazkov, Adam “Assault” Garcia, and Justin “SiLLY” Fargo-Palmer just beat Team Kaliber 3-1 in the winners bracket finals on Sunday. 

With this victory, Evil Geniuses have at least secured a second-place finish at the biggest Call of Duty event of year—and they’ll have the winners bracket advantage in the grand finals later today.

ACHES, a 2014 Call of Duty world champion, spoke with Dot Esports following EG’s impressive victory that clinched a grand finals berth.

Team Kaliber was undefeated in Hardpoint heading into that series. What was your mindset going into the match? 

ACHES: I just don’t feel like they’ve had that many tests in Hardpoints so far in this tournament. They’ve played Rise, and that’s about it. I think we match up really well against them, so we weren’t really worried. We definitely won the veto process—we got the maps that we wanted. I just think we have a style of play that’s not as aggressive as theirs and we don’t play their game, we make them play ours, and it worked perfectly to execution. 

The Search and Destroy was super close, but what happened in that map that ended up making it not go your way? 

That was their pick for SnD, but we also really like that map. I’m the playcaller for our team and I feel like we called it really well. The 4-4 round where we basically blind-countered A, and we knew they were gonna go late-A, Ap got pretty bad timing, gave up his lane, and it ended to where they got a push and blooded Ap. I feel like if we win that round, we definitely win that map. But for the most part, it was gonna be a slugfest. They’re really good at Forest SnD, so are we, and they just edged it out in the end. 

Obviously it’s not your first time in a CoD Champs grand finals, but what has this experience been like for you so far?

Yeah, I mean, this tournament has had every test it possibly could’ve. We were one map away from going home. We’ve already knocked out OpTic, and we’ve pretty much had a dominant run through the winners bracket—we’ve lost three maps and won 12, so that’s pretty good. I think it’s just a confidence thing. Obviously we didn’t have the hardest bracket, but we steamrolled it, which built confidence along the way. And I think that test vs. Team Kaliber really showed everybody that the bracket didn’t matter—we’re here to play and we’re good enough to be in that grand final.

This is going to be Apathy’s third-straight grand finals at CoD Champs. Has his and your experience at Champs meant anything to your team at this event?

I think the Champs experience we have is just a confidence thing. Ap’s a consistent beast. What’s good about having a team where you can believe in all your players is that you never have a moment of doubt, and I think that’s super important when you’re in these big matches in front of a huge crowd. We have confidence in every single one of us—if it goes down to game five, round 11, we all trust each other to win that one-vs-one, and I think that’s super important. 

What are you going to try to do to get your second ring? 

I hope we play Team Kaliber, just because we did the most prep against them. We have laptops here, so we’re definitely going to do prep against FaZe just in case. But as long as we play our game like we did in that last series, and keep the same energy we’ve had against OpTic and in that match we just played, we’re a really tough team to beat. We’re well-rounded in every mode, and I think that’s the scariest part. 

ACHES and Evil Geniuses will take the stage later today with the hopes of being crowned the 2018 world champions.