Blvkhvnd have surprised many people with their performance this week in the ALGS Championship. The APAC South team ran through the group stages like it 🃏was a public lobby and comfortably topped the winner’s bracket, netting them a spot in the final and ten seeding points to help them on their way. “Our performance has been very inspiring,” says in-game leader (IGL) StrafingFlame. “I wasn’t expecting us to do this well.”
But it hasn’t been plain sailing for the team, especially the IGL. He believes that the team has made too many little mistakes this week, and that there’s still plenty more to co🐭me from them. As to why their performance has suddenly clicked after di🔯sappointing performances at this year’s LANs? It’s all about confidence, and dealing with the pressure.
“I&💃rsquo;ve always really struggled with pressure,” he tells me. It’s surprising, coming from a calm and eloquent man who is sitting atop the ALGS leaderboards and seems to be hitting his stride at the highest pressure environment he’s likely ever been in.
“In my previous two LANs, I've been really bad with pressure and I've always let it affect me,” he explains. “I’d be fighting, shooting them face to face at point blank and instead of focusing on the present, focusing on the moment, focusing on the person I'm shooting at, I'm thinking I'm gonna fail. Those thoughts really didn't help.”
He was getting inside his own head and struggling with switching between his IGL brain, looking at the bigger picture in a match, and his fighting brain. When it came to spraying a magazine full of bullets at an opponent, his mind would be elsewhere and he’d miss easy shots. “A lot of the time on my first spray, I'll be a nervous wreck,” he explains. “When I'm still focusing on IGLing, I'll forget to calm myself down and on my first spray, I hit nothing. But after I realised that I needed to calm myself down and start focusing on the game, I started shooting nukes.”
“I’m playing the best I've ever played competitively” - StrafingFlame
He praises his teammates’ cal𒐪m and capability under pressure, and came up with some pressure neutralising techniques for himself ahead of flying from Indonesia to Birmingham. The most important is to minimise the importance of the tournament, forget that there’s $2 m🌼illion on the line, and play it like it’s any other match. After all, he’s good enough to get plenty more of these opportunities before he retires from esports.
“What happens now almost doesn't really matter to me because I have 30 more LANs until I'm 30,” he says. “That's a lot of opportunities, so I'm not really scared of failing anymore.”
Strafin🎃gFlame’s newfound confidence has helped Blvkhvnd find form at the most important stage of the season, and it would be hard not to label them as favourites heading into the final, based purely on Championship form. For the team’s IGL, though, he’s just glad his hard work is being rewarded.
“I’m playing the best I've ever played competitively,” he says. “All the hours grinding, playing the game, aim training on KovaaK's… It's all paying off.”
However, the preparation didn’t stop there. StrafingFlame is quick to spread the praise across the team and beyond, labelling Muamar ‘EzFlash’ Abrar as the best fragger in the world, regardless of input, and Ethan ‘PlayerKay’ Foo as the best Wattson player in the world, but he put in the work himself, ꦦtoo. He recounts tales of staying up until 3am every night “doing homework” on other teams by watching their VODs, a🅠nd analysing his own performances in a similar way, before going to sleep and doing the same thing again the next day.
StrafingFlame also gives a lot of credit to his coaches, both team coach Justin ‘Voltic’ Maunz and his own personal trainer, who goes by Coach Nihil. “About a month and a half ago, I went back to [Coach Nihil] because I was at a crossroads and didn't really know how to improve,” says StrafingFlame. “And I genuinely had my mind blown… I want to attribute a lot of our success to him because we are so much better fundamentally as a team because of him.”
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Confidence and coaching are two vital aspect🔜s of Blvkhnd’s success, but they’re also doing things their own way. PlayerKay’s Wattson is an unusual, off-meta choice, but StrafingFlame sings the electrical engineer’s praises, especially when it comes to her Ultimate ability. Protecting yourself and your teammates from grenades can be the difference between securing a great spot until the endgame or dying early and bereft of points.
Blvkhvnd also operates out of Landslide, widely 🦂known as one of the worst POIs to land on in the game. It’s got terrible rotations and the l🍸oot isn’t great, but StrafingFlame wants to ensure consistency, and few teams will ever contest them off the drop at such a bad spot. A contest essentially comes down to a 50/50 chance as to which team progresses into the rest of the match, and StrafingFlame isn’t willing to risk it.
But how confident is he heading into tomorrow’s grand final? StrafingFlame is honest and says that before the tournament he was predicting a top ten or possibly top five finish, but their group and elimination stage form has made him r♈ethink their chances.
“I was telling myself and my team that we were gonna win the LAN, but I never really believed it,” he says. “I was saying it, but you're just telling yourself that and I didn't really believe it until we came second place in the Launch Site game with 14 kills. That was the moment I realised we're going to win this.”
Whether they win or fall just short, Blvkhvnd have already shown what they’re about this week; they and their region have earned the world’s respect whatever happens. But, more importantly, StrafingFlame has conquered his personal demons, isn’t cracking under the pressure, and has the tools at his disposal to lead his team to victory. Will Blvkhvnd be the team to break the chokehold that TSM and DarkZ🍷ero have on Apex Legends LAN events? Only time will tell, but perhaps for the first time in his Apex career, StrafingFlame is confident.