Team SoloMid defeated Cloud9 in a thrilling five-set match to win the spring split championship of the North American League of Legends Championship Series on Sunday. Afterward, members of TSM talked to assembled press in a news conference. The highlights are below: How do you keep motivation up and not burn out? Søren “Bjergsen” Bjerg. I think for (me), it’s focusing on a lot of smaller goals and working on a lot of smaller things I can improve on. Even though I might not improve at really major things, there are a lot of these really smaller things that I can track from week to week and see I’m getting better and better at this, and that’s kind of my daily motivation is. Small things that I can get better and better at. That’s always working towards a big goal. Pigeon released a hazard. Did you get any interaction with that? Bjergsen: I thought it was like bug. Jason “WildTurtle” Tran: There was an actual bug too. You have had some stages of development working with Doublelift and then WildTurtle, now you’re coming into your own. How did you adjust to be a more independent player and finding your feet with TSM? Vincent “Biofrost” Wang: In the first split when I played with TSM, I was just really excited to be there, and Peter helped me a lot with his playbook as well as what to (do) around bottom lane. I think after I switched and went with Turtle, I had to also learn how to play with a new AD Carry, so there was that transition period, and I think Turtle and I have gotten a lot better since we first played. We just try to improve on a lot of small things that people don’t necessarily see, of course also the obvious ones. We just want to be the best that we can. With the MSI stage being really long, there is a very short amount of time for you guys to practice for the summer split. What are your thoughts on being chased for time after MSI and how do you plan to adjust? Parth NaiduI think it’s a really strange decision to make MSI this long because we’re gonna, right after finals two or three days later, we’re leaving and going to MSI and assuming we’ll be playing for the entire time, it ends on May 21st, and two weeks after that the summer split starts. I think at least in the future, something needs to be remedied where they either shorten MSI, or they leave a longer period of time between the next season’s start, or give a bye week to the team that made it to MSI. CLG said last year that they were really disadvantaged by going to MSI because they had no time to rest and summer was a long process to season, to playoffs, to worlds. I think we’ve already sort of determined after MSI to take a week, week and a half off, and even if we are somewhat rested coming into summer, hopefully that won’t hinder us too much and we’re just going to take it slowly coming into the beginning of the summer and hopefully build a momentum towards the end. The last three games Cloud9 looked very strong, but the first two games, people were commenting that they weren’t playing like themselves at all. What was your impression right after Game 2 and how C9 was playing? Bjergsen: I think it was pretty obvious that they were playing uncharacteristically bad. They were just dying in lane getting solo-killed. It’s not really what I would expect since C9 has really strong individual players pretty much across the board. They were all dying in their lanes, dying to ganks, dying to pretty much everything we set up. It was really unlike C9. I tried to reinforce to everyone on the team that if C9 plays better we have to play better than we did in Game 1 and Game 2. I didn’t think we played super well in Game 1 and Game 2; they just fell over and let us destroy them. What are your thoughts on the pressure that was on you earlier in the split after many teams announced they would add Korean top laners to their rosters? Kevin “Hauntzer” Yarnell: Coming into the split, every team was announcing that they got new Korean top laners like Ssumday, Flame, Looper, and everyone in the community was saying that it was going to be a really rough split for native NA tops and they’re going to have to prove themselves. But I think that’s maybe just because of how the community overrates Korean players, and getting to play against them during the split, they’re not as good as the fans say they are, and it was just kind of playing against mediocre opponents. It didn’t feel like there was too much pressure on me after I played against them because they’re not as good as people think they are.