TL Bjergsen: “We’re kind of having trouble finding consistency right now”

Team Liquid’s mid-laner, Bjergsen, is known as one of the greatest mid-laners of all time, and the best in North America. I had the opportunity to sit down with him and ask him some questions about the split so far, which team is the best at the moment, and more.

Team Liquid Honda Bjergsen Interview:

First of all Bjergsen, congratulations on beating CLG. What was it like playing against a team that is so young, and is getting a lot of hype from the community right now?

I don’t really think of them too differently. I think Palafox is a strong laner, and I was expecting him to go for something where we were going to brawl it out a little more in the lane, rather than the Corki. I was preparing myself to fight and have a lot of skirmishes around mid.

They ended up picking a very scaling champion in the mid-lane, so I felt like it was very free for me to get stacks on the Swain, push the lane and move around the map. I felt very comfortable playing that game. It felt like they deviated from what they had success with, and I don’t think it worked for them very well, I’m pretty sure they are going to go back to their brawling style of drafts.

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You mentioned Swain just now. This was the second game of Swain today. I was wondering what your thoughts were on the champion in the role. I believe right now (as of the recording of the interview) his win rate in Platinum and up is 52.16%.

I don’t know. Sometimes the champion feels overpowered and super strong, and in some games, you don’t do any damage and you just die. I think a lot of it depends on how strong you are in the game. When the champion starts getting ahead, it’s super oppressive.

You can just outlive everyone’s damage, you slowly kill them over time, and you have a lot of crowd control. If you fall behind then you don’t get your items fast enough and you become a sitting duck and people will just kill you.

I think he’s a situational champion, definitely better against team comps that deal less overall damage. If you’re playing against champions that have a lot of damage per second, then you can’t out-sustain it with your ultimate, so I think it’s situational.

It’s been dominating solo queue ever since the mini rework came out during the break between the Spring and Summer Splits.

I would like to ask about “The Circle Of Suck”. It was a term coined last year on Reddit, where every team would beat a team that was better than them and lose to a team worse than them. Do those circumstances or those outcomes make it harder to prepare for a team when you’re reviewing them before you play them?

It just makes me not think about, as much, the team that we’re going to be playing. I see them all as having the possibility of showing up and having a really good game or showing up and having a really bad game, including ourselves. We’ve done both, showing up and having great games and showing up and having really bad games.

Since there’s no team that’s really consistently really strong, I would still say that EG is still showing up consistently the strongest even though they lost against CLG, I want to say that was their only loss. EG looks like they can most consistently be a strong team to beat, but I don’t feel that there’s any team that’s clearly the best team.

It makes me think more about what can we do, why are we inconsistent, and why are we not playing to the level that we were in week one. Why are we not the same as our Korean BootCamp or even that we show up in scrims? We’re kind of having trouble finding consistency right now, and I care about that more than the strength of the other teams.

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My last question is about catchup mechanics. Last week we saw CLG win against EG even though EG was pushing into their base and still had objective bounties. Do you think that catchup mechanics and bounties have become too strong in the game?

I’m not sure. I read that the gold was pretty even, but CLG had a lot of dragons, but I don’t think that it should push the catchup mechanics that strongly. Having two or three dragons doesn’t impact the game nearly as much compared to having a significantly bigger gold lead. Some dragons don’t synergize with certain champions.

Even though they are worth gold, in the context of some comps, they aren’t super significant. It’s not something that I think about too much. I think I would still prefer a game without bounties probably. It feels bad when you’re the winning team and you have to keep your objectives alive rather than pushing the tempo of the game and being willing to make trades.

For example, giving up one tower to take two towers and a rift herald, or taking two towers and a dragon. It’s still good, but it’s a little bit worse now with the catchup mechanics. I do think it’s good that if a team makes a throw around baron pit that it significantly hurts you. I think there’s good and bad.

Thank you to Team Liquid Honda and Bjergsen for sitting down with me for the interview. If you’re interested in following Bjergsen’s Twitter, click here to go straight to his account, or click here to go to his twitch page. Team Liquid Honda plays against Golden Guardians this Saturday at 5:30 PM PST/ 8:30 PM EST/ 1:30 AM BST.