No problem. Thanks for inviting me to the interview 🙂

I started to play BW online at the end of 2009 when we first got internet at home. Before that time I was familiar with RTS games, I enjoyed playing WarCraft 3 at Russian PC bangs with my friends. I played some StarCraft back then as well, but it was mostly vs computers and I got destroyed by them all the time. I would drop it after 2 or 3 games and then come back after some time to try again, but nothing was changing 😄 Then my friend gave me a game magazine with some StarCraft stuff in it. It had an article about Boxer's vs Yellow bunker rush build and V-Gundam's TvP build. I read it, tried to copy it vs computers and it worked 😄 Then I started to play StarCraft vs AI from time to time such as 3vs5. I think it was in 2003~2006, but I don't remember the years exactly.

Yeah, I would take 2 computers as ally and play vs 4 or 5 of them as Terran 🙂

First thing I did was registering with one of the social networks - Vkontakte (Russian facebook). I was trying to get new friends or a girlfriend with that. Haha. After 2 days that became super boring, so I started to think about what else I could do with internet. All my friends were playing Counter Strike but I never like shooters and decided to play something else instead. Somehow I got into StarCraft as it was one of the games I enjoyed and spent playing some time when I was younger. I have no idea right now why it was StarCraft and not WarCraft though, because I liked WarCraft more when I was a kid 🙂

Actually, I just remembered why I chose StarCraft! I saw the first StarCraft 2 game between the developers and I really liked it, so I decided to dive deeper into BW to get to know more about the game by the release of the SC2. I started looking for sites dedicated to StarCraft and I read various articles. The first news I remember reading was about the WCG 2009, it was a match between the German player Kolll and Korean player Bisu or Stork. In the article they wrote that young Kolll (at that time he was 16 years old if I'm not mistaken) made it really far into the tournament, and I decided that I had a year to reach about his level, because I was a year younger 🙂

I didn't really know at the time that StarCraft would be a big part of my life, it was just a hobby after school, so I didn't really care about other players. I was just trying to get better at the game one day at a time.

Yeah and when I first time played Kolll, in a clan war in late 2011 I believe, I was super excited too 😄 And I beat him at this CW, but he wasn't really practiced at that time.

I have been to Korea 2 times; the first time in 2019 and the second time in 2023. I would have gone to Korea in 2020 as well, but unfortunately that was when the pandemic started.

I went to Korea to train and take part in the ASL - the top class StarCraft tournament. When I went there the first time, I unfortunately did not get the dates for the qualifiers of ASL nor KSL.

The first visit was not a spontaneous decision, it's just that at that time I had a full time job and I had to plan this trip in advance and no one knew the exact dates of the qualifiers for ASL or KSL. I guessed, judging by the previous seasons what time period the qualifications would be, but unfortunately I did not guess right.

I played in the ACS - part of the ASL tournament for non-professionals. Unfortunately I played very badly in this tournament and got out pretty early. At the ASL, I knocked out an ex-League of Legends pro, Tank, and another strong Zerg. On the first day of the qualifiers I was out after losing to Soma and on the second day I immediately fell to Ruin. Both players that I lost to ended up in the ASL. Overall I'm definitely not happy with my results. I hope I'll do better next time, when I have a chance to go to Korea again 🙂

Yes, I arrived a little early to adapt to the environment rather than the latency and time zone. I lived in a very small room with not the most comfortable work space, which was a little annoying. I do not think that this greatly affected the result, but next time I will take a more responsible approach to address this issue. As for the training schedule, there was no strict schedule, and in fact it’s almost impossible to learn something in StarCraft in a few weeks, so I just trained at a comfortable pace. Before the tournament I tried to plan a schedule so that it would be convenient for the tournament, eat well and get enough sleep 🙂

As for the food, it was not very convenient either since I was just by myself in Korea (Seoul) this time. It's not great to go to Korean cafes alone, plus I didn't live in a tourist area and there were some difficulties with the language barrier. I mostly ate at places where there were self-service kiosks. My favorite dishes besides Korean BBQ were soup stew with some stuff and hochao chicken.

Yes, I lived in Kazakhstan for a few months before going to Korea. I was on vacation when the mobilization began and decided not to return to Russia at that moment. Now I am back in Russia because I need to settle some issues and paperwork, after that I will most likely leave Russia again for a while. Unfortunately, I cannot yet tell the details of where and why, but soon I will let my fans know about it. In general, war is disgusting, there is nothing good in it, and life has not become better for sure.

As for the girls, everything is quite simple, I have been married for almost 5 years and love my wife very much. I spend most of my time outside of StarCraft with my wife. I don't really have any other hobbies. I play a little League of Legends and sometimes watch football and some stuff on YouTube.

I was a professional swimmer and football player as a child so sports was always something close to me 🙂

Yeah, it is 🙂

Well honestly I never had one. I always tried to take best from different players like Bisu, BeSt, Jangbi, Stork, free[gm], Anytime and many others. But right now I enjoy watching Rain. I think he's best Protoss player of all time, because he combines everything that I like in a player - incredible micro control, competent build orders and macro and excellent decision making in various critical situations. Unfortunately he's not playing much lately, but when he plays he still rocks!

Well honestly, as a professional player trying to learn something new, I don't like players such as Snow and Mini. They are amazing players from a viewer's perspective, but it's hard to copy their play style/build orders/strategy because they mostly rely on micro control, which you never can copy.

Hmm. I don't have big one for myself yet, I hope it will be joining ASL one day haha. But honestly winning tournaments is always nice, the biggest one for me was RCG 2020, so i'll say this one.

I'm fine with playing all 3 matchups 🙂 I'm confident with my skill level so if everything will go right, this BSL should be mine!

Yeah haha, I should finally make Nyoken proud of me!

😄

Yep, I played some on ShieldBattery and I like it. The only bad part about it - not enough players. And honestly I have no idea how to attract more players to this platform, maybe host some tournaments only on ShieldBattery. But in the end if battle.net will be still playable, most players will still go there instead of ShieldBattery...

Yep, thanks for inviting me to the interview once again! I'd like to say thanks to all my viewers and supporters and special thanks to the guy with the nickname fantomofdoom, without his financial support it would be impossible for me to be a full time StarCraft person so thank you very much!