"I feel it's good to maintain a good rapport by meeting up face-to-face," Yip says. Evidently, the sessions have been paying off: after a lacklustre year of disappointing results, TLO managed to reach as far as the round of 32 at the Valencia event, and performed even better at Dreamhack Bucharest the following month, only losing in the round of eight, and taking out Fnatic’s Harstem 2-1 before losing to Team Acer’s Nerchio 0-2. That was followed by a round of 12 finish at Dreamhack Winter, while the year would wind down with a play-off finish in HomeStory Cup VI, narrowly losing 2-3 in a best of five series against Kang 'Symbol' Dong Hyun.

Originally, Yip didn't help out with grand projects such as getting players tournament ready, it started off with some smaller things. Yip says, "Initially it was purely just helping out with the mental side of things – say for example a player comes to me and says he gets an adrenaline rush when he plays, and when he's winning towards the end of the game, his hands start shaking and he loses his concentration. So I'd work with him on some relaxation techniques and try to find out why he's getting the rush to begin with. Is it because he's winning? Is it because he's holding his breath, and his heart rate increases?"

“So that was what I was doing with Dario, and the more I spoke with him, he taught me about how other players were doing things, and I realised it was more of a systemic way of players practicing that was really counter productive to how they should be practicing. Like, from a sports coach's perspective, if I was looking at how they were practicing, it didn't really line up with the stimulus they'd have to face in a tournament. It was a very casual based practice, but, the tournament setting, when they went there, they weren't prepared for what they were facing.”

“So, there was a whole load of variables that they didn't really have the knowledge about. Stuff like what they should be eating, how important sleep is, breaking up practices, and how important preparing for a tournament is - and not leaving anything to chance. I think in sport over the last ten years, you'll see that teams have invested a lot of money into making sure that everything has been taken care of - that there's no stone unturned, in terms of that players go in as close to 100 percent as possible. It's not left to chance, there's so little luck in the preparation for sport, that when you come onto the field or the court, you know, sport can happen - things can happen that are random - but if you're prepared, everything is taken care of. It's almost like the opposite with eSports at the moment, but there's so much growth that could happen in training.”

“It'll eventually happen,” Yip is certain, “but there's not really much of a sporting background in eSports at the moment, so players can't be expected to know these things.”