“I didn’t have in-game sound this match,” NRG coach Chet on technical issues and more from VCT Americas Week 1

Week 1 of VCT Americas 2023 has come to a close. Three days of incredible matchups culminated with a surprising sweep of NRG at the hands of Leviatán. NRG and coach Chet "Chet" Singh had their work cut out for them in their first series of the league. Following the match, esports.gg caught up with Chet to ask him about the results.

While the first map could have gone either way, the second was about as one-sided as it could be. Chet was well aware of that during our conversation, but did not shy away from telling us about composition changes, the newest players to the team, and some technical issues he experienced at his coaching station.

"Let's start with the role changes we saw on Pearl. FNS and Victor swapped Agents, playing Skye and Viper, respectively. Neither of them had played their Agent prior to this match, so whose idea was it to make the swap, when did it happen, how quickly did the two become comfortable with those Agents?"

Chet: "After Brazil we kind of talked about putting FNS more in the middle of the map and you can't really do that as a Sentinel or Viper and Victor is pretty flexible. I think he's gone through almost every character at this point and he's played well as all of them.

"So we just kind of took the gamble for like a week of practice and just wanted to see how he would perform, how they would do, and how it would affect the calling. A lot of last year, FNS was in the middle of the map as an Initiator and that was really helpful for our attack side. We just wanted to see if we could repeat a similar formula with that and it ended up working out decent for both players."

"There was another comp change on Lotus. Firstly, we saw FNS on Breach, taking on an Initiator again in the series. Do you feel this will be the norm going forward, with the IGL on that Initiator role? Not just on NRG, but in VALORANT as a whole."

Chet: "I think it kind of depends on how you structure your attack side, because sometimes a Controller player can be in the middle of the map, but sometimes for us it's not the case. I mean, there might be times where you see, for our team, FNS on a Controller role and he might be in the middle of the map still, but it just really depends. We and other teams just have to structure all those things differently to accommodate for the IGL's."

"And next, what changed from the no-Duelist, double Controller composition to cause the need for a Duelist on the map?"

Chet: "Well, we just experiment a lot with comps and stuff. As NRG, we've gone through like Neons and Razes and Jetts and all sorts of stuff in our practices. That just happened to be the last thing we fell onto and we were just comfortable running it, because we think we have very comfortable retakes on that comp. So in practice, it was going well. Unfortunately, their retakes on their defense ended up being a lot better than our post-plant, so they just taught us a lesson in that game."

"Okay, well those maps were both very close when NRG played them at LOCK//IN with Lotus being one that got away from you guys this time around. With such a small sample size in officials on both of these maps, what immediate adjustments do you feel need to be made?"

Chet: "Well we didn't have a chance to watch the game back yet, so we're definitely going to watch it back and then evaluate our positioning and just how we approach our post-plant. It was a problem at LOCK//IN and we kind of addressed it, which you saw on Pearl. We actually had better post-plants, but on Lotus they had a really good plan against things that we wanted to do."

"When it comes to the newest players on NRG, how coachable have you found them to be when mistakes are made and losses like this happen?"

Chet: "They're pretty coachable. We review every day after practice. You know, we talk about our mistakes and there's very little to no arguments coming from them. They just accept the criticism given by either me or FNS or you know, some of the original members. We're all able to give that feedback to each other. So I mean, honestly, they've been good teammates and I can't really say anything else."

"It felt like Tacolilla was a huge difference maker on that second map. He didn't have the most impactful first map, but he heated up on Lotus. How frustrating is it as a coach, sort of watching from the sidelines, when a player like that pops off and gets in his groove against your team?"

Chet: "You can kind of play around it, so if you see him popping off, maybe that's something you want to avoid. That's something we could have planned for a little bit better, but we had a good idea how to shut him down on Pearl and unfortunately, we didn't get to transfer that over to Lotus.

"I think, just from my perspective, we eventually did adapt and avoided him a bit, or we executed well around him. We just got a good learning lesson, that even if he didn't have this initial kills as the star of the round, we still have to play around him in the middle of the round to the end. I don't think we played for that well."

"I brought up 'watching from the sidelines' there. What's the coaching situation like at VCT Americas? Do you feel you have the tools available to properly do your job or does it truly feel like you're just sitting on the sidelines at times?"

Chet: "There are some technical things I definitely would address with Riot later about the setup that they provide right now. I mean, it's very minimal at the moment, but I know at other events they've had, for example, like I didn't have in-game sound this match, so it's kind of hard for me to follow the game just watching the perspectives.

"I'm sure anyone spectating would have a hard time with no in-game sound. For me it was just like, I don't know if the Skye bird got information, on Pearl for example, stuff like that. I'm just missing that from the game so makes it harder for me to come up with a plan at the moment, but I still adjusted to it."

"Well, there's plenty of the VCT Americas league left. Aside from the obvious answer of 'win,' what is the one thing you want to see from your players in the coming weeks?"

Chet: "I just want to be more adaptable in the mid round. I feel like a lot of the times we're just kind of hoping we win the round, doing whatever we did by default. So, maybe moving forward we get a little bit more proactive or have a better plan moving forward."

Thank you to coach Chet from NRG for speaking with us. Stay tuned to esports.gg for all of your esports news and to keep up to date with VCT Americas results and standings.