UKCT - UKCounterTerrorist

With the ESWC groups released only a couple of days ago, I caught up with Sp|ke from dignitas.

Nic: Hi Sp|ke. You're attending the ESWC finals with Song instead of Suffz. Is it frustrating to be attending another event with a stand-in?

Hi, yes its frustating having to go over maps with a new player what seems like every second event but Song has been really good so far and everyone is happy with him as a stand-in so it shouldn't harm our play too much.

You've been drawn against MiBR again, as well as Millenium. In a strange coincidence the previous dignitas squad ( KritikaL and co) lost to a French team ( Back to Reality) at GameGune much like you did to dRu this year. However the same squad at ESWC managed to then beat emuLate 16:14. Do you feel you can improve on the previous squads performance at the last finals?

The Millenium game should be what decides if we go through the group, if we don't make mistakes and its not on de_tuscan I think we should be able to beat them and make it through. Then we just need to make sure we keep ourselves from making any mistakes and we should probably be able to match their performance if we don't get unlucky in the brackets.

Give me a brief rundown of the teams in your group.

Sure.

MiBR: Just won GameGune and they are pretty certain to qualify from the group and probably a favourite to win the whole tournament. After playing them at GameGune we know we can get really close to them so hopefully we can beat them this time.

Millenium: They're around top three in France just now I think or are usually around there haven't seen any recent French results, we normally have some close games in PCWs but I'm expecting to beat them if it's on anything but tuscan.

mindless and XuXan: Both from South America I think. I haven't really seen them play or seen them at any South American tournaments so I don't expect them to come top 3 but we won't underestimate any team we go up against as they won their qualifiers so they must be decent at least.

As mentioned earlier, theres a chance you may be playing de_tuscan. Have you put any preparation into this map?

We've played a few gathers on tuscan but that was about a month ago before the ESWC uk qualifiers and apart from that we haven't done anything on it. Hopefully we have time to go over it but if we can't I'm guessing we'll use some sort of mill tactics on it. Don't think we've even played a mill game or gone over strats on it since I joined though.

Who would be your top three picks for this event?

mTw.dk, MiBR and MYM.PGS. But I hope wNv.cn do well because I like to watch Savage and their play style as a team.

Is there anyone you'd especially like to play? (and beat!)

Actually just MiBR and Millenium, to prove to ourselves that we can beat MiBR and I think Millenium have been giving some abuse about us so it would be good to beat them. Maybe Evil Geniuses.us as well since we had a game we thought we should have won vs them at the KODE5 finals as well.

After ESWC I'm guessing your sights will be firmly on the ESL Extreme Masters III season. After beating Team-Coolermaster earlier this week you're assured of place in either round one or two. Do you feel you can progress to a reasonable level in the tournament?

As long as we practice which I think we will I think we can do really well in this, maybe even qualify for the LAN finals if we get lucky with the draws.

Speaking of the coming months, will you be taking part in SGL Season 9? Or even the next CSGN season which will apparently be in October, if rumours are true.

I'm not really sure we would need to talk about it and see if everyone would like to. I would like to play in them anyway!

You've played both WC3 (with cubesports) and 1.6 to a high level, which do you feel has the better competitive scene?

Both of them have a lot of people playing in the UK with only the top three four being able to challenge each other, problem with WC3 was the tournaments never got a public post so there was only ever 4-6 people turning up to tournaments.

I think the WC3 community is a lot friendlier though but WC3 only has a few players who win tournaments now while CS has lots of teams that can turn up and win an event. Because of that I like to watch CS more.

IG6 is apparently being planned, wlll you be looking at attending despite Omega Sektors failings at the last big LAN (Summer Slam/ESWC UK) that took place there?

Yes hopefully we can attend it. I think that only happened because the whole centre was rented out instead of the usual one room but hopefully they have learned from it either way. I did hear something about it being BYOC though which would be too hard for us to attend with three of us having to fly.

Were you not tempted to attend Wiredinn 4, even with a mix team?

I think it happens either the same day or the day after we land coming back from ESWC, think 2 people planned to go with seperate teams but didn't know we landed when it had probably already started.

Right, thanks for the interview. Good luck at ESWC, any shoutouts?

Thanks we'll need it! Shoutouts to Kerpow/wink, Creative, Abit, Scan, Razer, Zyxel, Intel, Dell and last but not least Drea Reilly!

ESWC kicks off Monday the 25th.

Good luck to dignitas!

Group B:

MiBR
dignitas
Millenium
mindless
XuXaN

Modified by Nic on August 21, 2008, 4:47 pm.