IMay Road talks upset win vs. Flash Wolves, Worlds chances

Hang-Gil “Road” Yun is the support from the Chinese team IMay, the team that won their first Worlds match after stealing the Elder Dragon from Flash Wolves. After an impressive win, we got to chat with Road after the match.

Christopher "chhopsky" Pollock: IMay has been regarded as one of the best teams in China and I think we’ve all been looking forward to seeing what you guys can do. What was your plan going into the game today against Flash Wolves?

Han-Gil “Road” Yun: We mainly prepared our pick and bans. We focused on banning their main champions. All throughout the game, we had a mindset to focus on not making mistakes in the early game and we thought that if we dragged the game to late-game, we would have better late-game management, so we could win from that point in.

chhopsky: So obviously, you did end up falling behind in the early game, playing quite aggressively as always. Did that change the plan at all? Were you ever worried about the state of the game?

Han-Gil “Road” Yun: Our initial strategy was to actually play very defensively and counter-attack Flash Wolves’ moves. In the early game, our jungler got caught out by the Wolves’ jungler a couple of times and he was kind of in a disadvantage, so to cover that mistake, we had to make some aggressive moves. Overall, I think in the future, if we can improve on those mistakes, we can improve as a team in general.

chhopsky: So that was probably the longest dance around Baron that I’ve seen in a competitive game ever. What was going on with the shot-calling and the communication during that period? How long were you prepared to wait out for the perfect engage?

Han-Gil “Road” Yun: So before that Baron dance, at that time we were behind and the opponents’ dealers, like Lucian - they were ahead of our own ADC and mid. I think the opponent thought that Lucian scales less than our ADC, so they were kind of in a hurry to seal a victory while they were ahead. So they were trying to make a Baron move, but for our own shot-calling, we were just talking about [warding] Baron as much as possible and to farm until they’re actually doing the Baron. We were trying to stall them while farming our own dealers.

chhopsky: That’s a clever strategy that obviously worked out for you! IMay have improved in the course of this split and in 2016 in general. You’ve become on of my favorite teams in the LPL, if not my favorite team in LPL. Do you think you can make it to playoffs in this group?

Han-Gil “Road” Yun: So when we first saw the group draw results, honestly, we weren’t too happy to see that we were in a group with a lot of strong teams, but our coach kept on telling us to prepare our best. Since it took us a lot of effort to come to Worlds in the first place, let’s try even further than groups. So during the preparation for Worlds, we trained really hard and practiced really hard to improve our weaknesses. By winning our first game, if we can keep up this momentum, then we can also attend Worlds finals.

Chhopsky will be covering the group stages for The Rift Herald in San Francsico. You can follow along on Snapchat.