The Transition to Valorant: An interview with Adam “Kaplan” Kaplan
“One of the hardest parts was definitely learning quick decision making. You have to make decisions fast. When a decision comes up in Valorant, you need to act quickly. If you don’t decide in one or two seconds, you’re just dead because of enemy utility or something else. So you have to be on your toes.”
Level Up is a series of interviews with esports professionals, coaches, and individuals playing their part in innovating the competitive gaming scene. Follow their story and advice as we shed light on their journey.
Valorant was released on June 2, 2020, by Riot Games (Riot) and was met with immediate success. This rapid success, along with the pedigree of Riot Games, has led to a growing Esports scene within the game. All in hopes that Valorant will become the next big Esport: many players from Counter-Strike Global Offensive (CS:GO), Overwatch, and even Fortnite have flocked to the game to try and create their own success story. However, it’s not only players flocking to the game. Esports teams, outside organizations, and universities have been attempting to put their foot in the door to find success.
One of the players who made the jump to Valorant was Adam “Kaplan” Kaplan. First starting on Code Seven, he later created team Bloom which was picked up by Spacestation Gaming. With Spacestation Gaming as their IGL (in-game leader), Kaplan placed first in the NSG x Renegades Invitational first qualifier and placed 5th-6th in the First Strike Open UMG Qualifiers. He is no longer with Spacestation Gaming as of December 7th, 2020, and is now looking for new opportunities.
The team at Insights had a chance to talk to Adam “Kaplan” Kaplan to discuss his transition to Valorant, his process from being an unsigned player to a signed player, and what he’d suggest for amateur teams looking to be picked up by a pro-level organization.
NOTE: THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED BEFORE ADAM “KAPLAN” KAPLAN LEFT SPACESTATION GAMING.
Q: What was your experience before Valorant? Do you have any notable achievements?
I’m 26 years old right now, and I started playing competitive Counter-Strike Source when I was 13. I built a team with another friend that I met online, and we played in a league for two seasons. Then, I bounced around to different games. I played Call of Duty 4 competitively for a while, and I played this game called Brink. I played in the championship for Brink. In 2014, I got into Counter-Strike Global Offensive (CS:GO) and I was one playoff game from making into the premier division of the ESEA league. After, I took a break before returning to CS:GO about a year and a half before Valorant and played in ESEA Main with a few of my friends.
My most significant achievements throughout my years of experience were getting Top 8 in ESEA Main back in 2014; that was the most considerable achievement online, to say the least. However, I also have six or seven first-place finishes at local LAN events in Seattle, and I placed third place at an event at The Gaming Stadium in Vancouver, BC. The prize winnings were about $10,000, so it was a pretty big tournament.
Q: What were the things that made you swap to Valorant?
It’s tough to break through in any esport that’s been around for a while. To be honest, the amount of talent you need in Counter-Strike to get into the semi-pro (T2) NA scene is just enormous. It’s such a grind. Realistically, I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it. I had been playing Counter-Strike my whole life, and I didn’t think something was going to change. Starting day one in a new esport is just so much easier for making connections and going pro. I was one of the nerdy players on a CS:GO team, and Valorant appealed to me because it’s a much smarter game, in my opinion. It requires you to be a smarter player, and that’s more rewarding to me.
Even though those were my reasons for switching in the first place, I can confidently say now that Valorant is the most fun FPS (first-person shooter) that I’ve ever played. I like what Riot Games, the developer of Valorant, is doing with it. I’m happy I decided to make the switch.
Q: How easy was it for you to transition to Valorant? What were the most challenging parts of your transition?
It wasn’t as easy as most people would think it would be coming to Valorant from CS:GO. The amount of communication in Valorant was difficult for me at first because it required so much more than what I was used to. Also, I just think decision making in Valorant is more challenging. Like in post-plant or retake, you have to track a lot more abilities. For example, which abilities your team has, how to use them, how to use them together, and which ones the enemies have.
Lastly, one of the hardest parts was definitely learning quick decision making. You have to make decisions fast. When a decision comes up in Valorant, you need to act quickly. If you don’t decide in one or two seconds, you’re just dead because of enemy utility or something else. So you definitely have to be on your toes, and you also have to have better positioning. If you’re in a specific position and the enemy team knows, certain abilities can just kill you instantly.
Specifically, I wasn’t an IGL (in-game leader) in Valorant for the first three months. But, I did IGL in Counter-Strike for the year before that. When I started IGLing in Valorant, I realized it’s enormously more complicated. In Valorant, you need to track all of the abilities, and it gets confusing in the way different teams run their setups and play. I find it much, much harder than CS:GO.
Q: How did you overcome the challenges you ran into while transitioning to Valorant?
I didn’t have much at first since there were no coaches to help me. However, the most significant things that helped me the most were having people to talk to about the game and giving myself a framework to understand the game. I wasn’t just playing and watching the game, but I had very smart friends who were also trying to crack Valorant open. Being able to discuss the game with them for many hours outside of playing was extremely helpful. Some of the people to help me were my teammates on my first team, Code Seven, which became Built By Gamers. I also had some other friends, and my brother is an Overwatch coach so he was a great resource to bounce ideas off of considering Valorant has characteristics from Overwatch.
However, the biggest thing to help me was giving myself a framework for understanding the game. I grew up interested in poker and Magic: The Gathering. It sounds weird to connect card games to Valorant. But, a lot of those games are about understanding value and getting value out of specific things. If you look at Valorant, and you look at the utility and abilities that way, it becomes much easier to IGL and structure your play as a whole.
Honestly, I think a lot of players from certain shooters use their abilities very intuitively. And they just use them when their mind tells them to. I think we saw a lot of that early on in Valorant. When you play a game like poker or Magic, you think about the best things that your cards can do to put you at an advantage or to help you win the game. To apply this to Valorant, think about how often you can use your ultimate. Think about how you can take your ultimate and use it in a way where it’s most likely to help you win the game. That’s kind of how I set up the framework in my mind, at least when it comes to using ultimates.
Q: How were you able to take an amateur team and help them get signed by a pro organization?
I am all about positivity and high energy. Having that kind of environment helps keep the team together and improve faster. So, I wanted to build a team that was a lot like that, and I made that clear from the start. Also, I wanted to try IGLing because I had all these ideas, and I had been thinking about the talent I wanted on a roster for a while. I felt confident that I could IGL in a way that would help my team out. And then I just got lucky in the first practice with the players I brought together. Every one of them responded well to the positivity. They all have an excellent head on their shoulders. They’re friendly, confident, and energetic people.
We had this match environment and the scrim environment that was really positive and never downhill even after a bad round. It showed in the NSG x Renegades Invitational qualifiers. We had this huge grind through these qualifiers, and we had three straight days of terrible tournament performances as a team early on. Then, we just busted through this qualifier for 12 hours and came out first out of 100 teams. That impressed a lot of people.
Then, we got introduced to the manager of Spacestation Gaming, and we talked with him. The big pitch was that we’re a small team right now, but we have a lot of promise. For us, the promise was: look how high energy we are and look at how good our team atmosphere is. It’s rare to see that in esports on a smaller team. It’s something special. We don’t even need a coach to do it. We can have a coach that focuses so much more on helping us become better players. That was the pitch. It landed, and it has paid off for everybody involved.
Q: What were the main differences between being signed and not signed?
Before Spacestation signed the team, we played more and talked less. By that, I mean we didn’t ever VOD review. When we got signed and got a coach to structure the VOD review, it was really helpful. Even if the VOD we are reviewing was from yesterday or even earlier in the week, he has a great idea of what he wants to show us. It is much more efficient. When we got signed, we overall had a new structure for our practices.
Now, it is much more VOD review and less playing, which I think is the right way to do things. In terms of the actual hours, I think we practice the same amount as we did before we were signed in terms of maps per day and week. But, we might have done a little more previously. Especially when you’re trying out a player like we were trying out a fifth player at one point, you’ll end up practicing a bit more. Overall, the total hours in a week are probably the same, but are more focused and include more VOD review with a coach.
And the one other thing I’ll say is I’m confident everybody on the team puts their own hours into the game outside of team practice every day. That’s important to note. It’s not like we aren’t doing anything outside of team practices. Also, since I was a team leader before we got signed, I was doing a lot of what I feel a coach should do. But when we finally got a coach and got signed, I had a lot more time to focus on my IGLing and my mechanics. I didn’t have to focus on putting the team together as a coach would. My daily routine has a lot since we got signed, honestly.
Q: What is the best advice you could give to an amateur team looking to become signed?
If I could give one single thing, I would say stay together. Build a team where the atmosphere and attitudes between the five players are good because that will keep you together. And it’s going to make it so that growing and improving is easy. And if you can stay like that, you’ll probably just get ahead of everybody else. Valorant is similar to Counter-Strike. When you play Counter-Strike and similar games, people know the meta. It’s been the same meta for years and years. You can shuffle teams a lot and go right back to being a pretty structured team.
However, in Valorant, it gets complicated. It changes a lot; the setups and protocols you have as a team in your strats are crucial. Also, having a composition and a playstyle that fits your players takes time to figure out. So if you’re shuffling and having your team roster dying over and over, you’re just not going to get there. And on the flip side, that’s what’s happening to almost every tier two team. So, if you can stay alive for more than a month, you pretty much automatically become one of the four best unsigned teams. So just build something that is fun and sticks together.
To learn more about Adam “Kaplan” Kaplan and to keep up to date with his future endeavors, be sure to follow him on Twitter.
To keep up with our coverage of esports professionals like Adam, and to see how Insights is equipping these individuals, follow us on Twitter or visit our website, Insights.gg. We are building an all-in-one collaboration platform for VOD reviews and coaching.
