now that's fire content

I liked that.

I remember Raisy in a few 125 FPS cups, or maybe it was FaceIt. But he definitely had skill in Quake Live--just nothing standout like in Quake Champions.

I would've liked to hear whether Av3k or especially Evil had any impact on Raisy's playstyle. Cypher has likened Raisy to Evil. Raisy thinks a lot of stuff got nerfed because of him? Well, LG got nerfed to 666 in QL because of Evil. There's definitely similarity between these two players. It's a bit less true today, but in the earlier days of QC, that kind of +forward, always-present pressure was Raisy's hallmark, and rapha hated it. Even after Raisy won a championship, rapha flat out said Raisy wasn't the best. Thorin brought up a nice point about this mindset that the older pros had where they wanted the game to be more like Q3/QL and felt that whatever was currently in the game was BS, and any playstyle that used the mechanics were invalid, even if they were winning. I remember Vo0 saying he himself was surprised that he was doing so well in Quake tournaments (won two silvers in 2017) because he was using champs like Anarki.

Well regardless, Raisy stood the test of time, through all the patches and changes, and proved that he didn't win on just gimmicks. He built strong fundamentals, innovated, and executed. Getting that gold one day, whether it's in this Quake or the next, will unlock that mental barrier that's chewing at him in the back of his mind.

I know ESR isn't what it used to be, but I wanted to let you know, Thorin, that there are still people out here who care and appreciate you releasing in-depth Quake content.

that kind of +forward, always-present pressure

I find it funny that Quake players have grown to this dislike this "style," for me, this type of gameplay is the essence of Quake.

Raisy never played quake live for more than a few hours. He just barely tried it out on a friend's account, didn't stick.

As he himself stated multiple times, there was another guy with the "Raisy" nickname in quake live, it wasn't the actual, current Raisy.

Current Raisy never competed in quake live. He was a fully dedicated counter strike player back then.

Regarding your other point: Raisy doesn't have a mental block.

He won a major tournament waaaaay before casuals started talking about mental blocks, after he started his long streak of second/third places.

Most of those second place tournaments could have easily been wins in his favour, if only quake champions wasn't retarded even in the tournament format, forcing people coming from the loser bracket not only to play much more without pauses before the final, but ALSO to start the final 1 map off, which is ridicolously retarded even by modern quake standards.

As a result of such retardedness, players who reached the finals trough the loser bracket like Raisy always got there completely exhausted and still had to start with one map score difference.

Basically unsurmontable stacking in favour of the winner bracket finalist, i don't think anyone ever won a major from that position or the stats must be something like 95%/5%.

If anything, Raisy's mental issue is exactly that he thinks too high of himself, and consequently didn't train enough and trained badly. He also cared about playing originally, being different, much more than he should have to be more successfull.

Obsessing with off meta champs like the Reflex robot, fucking around with gauntlet, ecc ecc.

It also didn't help that no pro wanted to practice with him except Vengeur, his pre-tournaments practice consisted of random public ranked duels stomps against absolute no names, with the occasional accidental K1llsen thrown in there by the auto matchmaker against his will, that would soon rage and tilt.

All in all, Raisy was overperforming considering he was the second best quake champions player and he had no prior quake experience and zero success as a counter strike "pro".

if you watch the 2nd part of the interview (or lets better say only the relevant parts) ... he actually didn't play any training games against vengeur (which was also my suspicion, because the casters of QPL always tried to present them as team mates that practice with each other constantly, but they always seemed to avoid that question) ... even admits it's him that doesn't want to play against him, and he has also a lot of problems with many other players he seems to want to avoid .. but this a small detail that only stresses a bit his character trait of avoiding other players that could potentially beat him

Not really, every time you play a game vs someone in practice you run a risk of giving away your key strats. Any gain you get from playing them can go the other way.

He might decide its worth keeping certain opposition in the dark (as much as possible). Raisy is aim heavy, but killsen and vengeuer are probably one of several players in quake who can do that too, i played all 3 (once) and they have disgusting aim that feels more like a bot than a player.

There is no way raisy has no prior Quake experience.
He used to alias as YSIAR in QC, I also saw a quake III (might well have been cpma) video of a guy called raisy whose looked very very strong (chances of two players that good with same name are slim), guy also had over 10,000 hours on CS. Compete FPS junky for most of his life I would bet. And he has the quake III world record on nightmare, you would not do that on an old game unless you grew up with it.

It might be a top-level thing. In QL, Dahang and Rapha never played each other either. I remember right before one QuakeCon, they were on a passworded server, and Dahang didn't want Rapha streaming their matches. Now that I think about it, I don't recall them practicing duels in QC either.

Btw here's part 2, everyone: