Match commentary and interviews from the floor courtesy of RheingoldRiver

In the first game of Velocity vs The Salad Bar, both teams left very contested picks open: EHomda was given Twisted Fate, and frommaplestreet was able to pick up Draven.  The Velocity ADC took advantage of his pick to get first blood, and his team was able to take down the first of several towers of the game also, getting all three outer turrets by 13 minutes.  However, The Salad Bar's team fighting proved to be too much for Velocity to deal with, and DkBnet on Varus picked up kill after kill, off the constant global pressure of EHomda.  Though Velocity kept the gold even for a very long time, it lost nearly every teamfight, with multiple members of EHomda's team almost taken out over and over—but almost wasn't good enough, and though The Salad Bar lost one major fight near Velocity's top inhibitor turret, it was able to close out the game by 50 minutes.

No longer being allowed Twisted Fate, EHomda went for Karthus in game 2.  This also proved to be a strong choice for him early on, as his teleport and then Requiem helped his team get to a 4-0 start.  However, around 10 minutes, they went for a dragon that seemed safe, but Velocity's Cris contested their attempt, picking up a triple kill and letting his team steal away the objective.  Velocity started to take turret advantage, and despite a great group flash over a midlane wall to initiate a teamfight by The Salad Bar, Velocity's team fighting was for the most part too strong.  The game was pulled out into late game, but ultimately Nasus and Renekton were too much for Salad Bar to deal with despite their Karthus, and Velocity took the series to game 3.

In game 3, maplestreet again got first blood, this time also picking up an assist from a second kill by Evaniskus's Zyra.  EHomda, this time on Jayce, roamed bot for one revenge kill, and he did the same thing a minute later in top lane after Velocity's third kill.  The early game saw EHomda capitalize on his early advantage, dealing a lot of poke damage to especially Vileroze's Lux.  However, Velocity's team fighting showed very strong, and it won a major fight at about 19 minutes that led to a dragon and turret.  Velocity continued pressuring TSB, and won fight after fight.  At about 30 minutes, Nk Inc on Nasus duod Baron with maplestreet's Draven and, by that point, there was nothing that Salad Bar could do.  The baron led to two inhibitors for Velocity, and it ended up pushing the nexus at 38:15, moving on to fight Marn tomorrow.

Rhein:  Congratulations on taking out The Salad Bar.  I'm first going to ask a couple questions about the games themselves.  Your team said onstream that you were baiting out the TF pick, but then EHomda completely destroyed you with TF.  What was your reasoning, and why didn't it work out?

Cris:  We wanted for them to have TF and us pick super strong globals like Shen.  We had Zed-Shen, and we thought Zed-Shen would be really strong against TF, because Zed counters TF, and Shen's ultimate counters TF's ultimate.

You decided to ban TF in the second game.  Do you think you could maybe have made it work?  Or you just didn't want to have to worry about his TF?

We didn't want to worry about it.  His TF was really good, so we just took it out, and then whatever else he played just wasn't as strong, so it worked out.

It seemed like your Renekton was a lot stronger than your Shen.  Did that also contribute?

The reason we picked Renekton is because we knew their toplaner's best champ is Renekton, and we wanted to take his pick, so I played Renekton and did pretty good.

In the second game, you got a triple kill pretty early on.  As a toplaner, if you're able to get that sort of advantage very early on, how does that change how you play for the rest of the game?

It snowballed me completely.  I had so much gold when I went back to shop, and I bought strong items early, and it snowballed the game.  I think I was unkillable in most teamfights.

You ended up winning the game despite the fact that they had a late game Karthus.  How was your comp able to accomplish that?

I think that Nasus and Renekton together is really strong, because Nasus can do Baron really fast with his ultimate, and we're both pretty tanky, the frontline was really tanky, and we had a Twitch, so they would all try to kill the tanks while the Twitch would kill them all with his ultimate.

Tomorrow you're going to be fighting Marn, and you were actually knocked out of the Best Riven NA tournament by MegaZero.  Are you gonna be looking for revenge?

I'm looking forward to 1v1ing him, but I haven't been playing Riven a lot, I've been practicing other champions, and he's still been playing Riven a lot.  So he had the edge, and he had less ping too.  At my house, my internet's not that good, but I'm not trying to make excuses, his Riven is very good, and I could probably do really good against him with other champs like Renekton.

What champion would you like to challenge MegaZero to a 1v1 on?

I like Zed a lot right now.

Aside from practicing your 1v1 mirror matches, what is your team going to be doing to practice for Marn tomorrow?

We're gonna prepare mentally and try to camp MegaZero, try to shut him down.  We know their midlaner doesn't roam as much, like The Salad Bar's midlaner does, and we know that ecco doesn't do that as much.  I think he rarely roams, so we're gonna try to camp other lanes and just snowball the game.

Any final shoutouts?

Shoutout to my team Velocity, and everyone supporting me.  My twitter is @lol_cris, and my stream is twitch.tv/lolcris.