One of the players that received the most criticism over the last summer split was Kim "Olleh" Joo-sung. After winning the 2018 NA LCS Summer Split championship, he talked about how he overcame the criticism and how confident he is now.

This has probably been the most difficult year for you professionally. What do you want to say to your doubters after winning back to back championships?

Olleh: I think there were so many haters and there were so many bad comments on me in Reddit or any other websites. As I posted on my Twitter, I took it more seriously and I changed myself a lot. I tried to be myself, I just listened to music, good songs, even rap, I tried singing, dancing, whatever. I got myself, and whenever I played with Peter in spring, I was only a follower; I didn’t make any aggressive calls. But now, when I see a chance, I would say “Hey Peter just come” and we just make a play. I guess that’s the way.

In regards to games 1 and 2, your vision was super on-point. What kind of change between your past performances and your performance now in regards to vision, was this all part of the plan to keep vision bot side?

Olleh: In spring, even last year, I played tons of solo queue. I just follow my instinct and just put wards whenever I go somewhere, but Cain gave me lots of feedback about vision, that we need some plan for vision and we need some directions for vision. When we play around bot side, I just try to get the vision bot side. Then we change the plan; if our objective is at top side or Herald, I just start putting top side vision.

Because of Cain, I started to have more direction and I try to help our team. I ask like “Eugene, do you need vision?” and I just try to get vision for Eugene and we can play around that vision. So I think Cain helped me a lot about vision.

You’ve talked before about even when you have a hard time, you get support from your fans from Brazil and the LMS. How does it feel to have those original fans even after you’ve come so far?

Olleh: Even in spring, I was kind of sad because people just didn’t trust me. But, now I don’t care. I’d say I’m right. Actually, my former teammates are all retired, so who’s right? I’m here, I f**king won. (Laughter) So that’s [what's] right.
*Note: Olleh misunderstood the question; apparently he was talking about the criticism he was receiving.

At the end of the spring split, after the finals, you were the best team in NA. We’re back at the same exact point. MSI didn’t go as anyone expected really. How are you going to make sure that you don’t lose momentum this time and that history doesn’t really repeat itself?

Olleh: I think in MSI, I didn’t have confidence. I’m just being honest. This time, I’ll just be myself. I’m just going to do my best and I’m going to just make better synergy with Peter. Even though I was struggling, we beat the RNG bot duo and we were winning so hard.

This time I’ll make sure that I can play more champions than the enemy and then I can play better and play around objectives and follow our coach well. I’ll make sure Peter can get ahead in lane and I think this is all about me. Peter did well. It was just me struggling.

Doublelift: Okay, that’s not true. I ran it down in the second RNG game; I was playing Jhin against Kog’Maw-Braum. Honestly, bot lane so tricky because one person can make mistakes and it’ll snowball the lane. People say Ming is the best support in the world, but then, when they played against us, Olleh hit like five Morgana binds on him and we just kept killing him, so we got really ahead bot side.

So yeah, it’s just about punishing other people’s mistakes, and sometimes since bot lane has four people, there’s just a higher chance that someone of those four people will make a mistake. The bottom meta has been around for years. When you play around bot side, you pressure them, and someone is going to mess up.

I feel pretty confident that we’re going to this Worlds a lot better than we were going into the MSI. When I look at our MSI games, I feel like we were so bad. We were actually really bad. We were losing to EVOS and stuff so. We’re going to be a lot better this time.

※ Top Image from LoLesports.