EPT
.1
Snute at IEM San Jose
.2
Interview Transcription
So how are you feeling?
Good. The games were super laggy but it makes me feel better that even if the games were lagging like crazy—usually that would be a big problem for me—even here in the practice area the connection is a lot of trouble—, yeah I was able to deal with it surprisingly well. So I'm happy about being able to improve in that regard
So you were playing with a handicap and still winning.
Well the handicap is for both, but yeah.
Yeah that's true.
I dealt with it quite well.
Well it's good to know they're actually working on the fix right now so hopefully for the round of 8 tomorrow you won't have any lag and everyone will perform at a hundred percent.
I hope so!
So SAP Center, a giant hockey arena, have you ever played Starcraft in a giant sports arena before?
Mmm.. I think so. Many big arenas but I don't know if they are sports arenas. The one in Katowice I think is a big sports arena. But i'm not sure. Yeah it's really nice. The SC2 crowd was great.
Did you hear all the people cheering for you and everything?
After the 2-0 they were cheering like crazy so that was so good.
So I don't know if everybody saw but Snute has posted a blog a couple of months ago saying that you were probably going to take it easy for the rest of the year and lay low and not practice as much.
I think it was more like one and a half or two months ago. So my results have gone down a bit. I lost a lot in Norwegian tournaments as well to TargA. so I was starting to lose my confidence in ZvZ a bit. But I think I haven't been able to practice all that much lately. I've been trying to buy an apartment in Norway and get a stable practice situation next year. It's so hard, all the rich Norwegians are just out bidding me so I haven't been able to make all that much progress.
So you need more eSports money to buy that apartment?
Yeah so luckily now that I made it to the round of 8 I secured some additional dollars. So the future is bright!
So we know that you're really, really hard on yourself. Even at IEM Toronto when you took games off of Flash. The first thing you said was, "That was terrible, I didn't play well." Even today you weren't even confident going into the game versus TRUE. But you 2-0'd him even with lag.
I would not say that I was not confident against TRUE. I just knew that if I could stay on top of my scouting I should be fine. I was actually feeling quite good if the games had gone on longer. Against Flash I was happy to win [2 games] but I also feel like I didn't play as reasonably as I should have. So that was a bit disappointing. Yeah I feel like I've improved on that lately, not being too hard on myself.
I think that's always good. You said that you're starting to feel good again with ZvZ. And looking at your stats, you're currently still the best with ZvP. Do you have any advice for the zergs out there on how to win ZvP?
Make armies that can actually kill the protoss player's army. Swarmhosts are good, vipers are good. The best advice I can give is not waste resources on units that don't work for you. So make good units, like swarmhosts.
Swarmhosts is the key word here. How do you feel about being the number 1 swarmhost player currently?
Oh, it feels good! I just host it up and then I make more hosts. And if I see they don't make tempests, I make more hosts. And then I just relax on my Hosts Luxury Cruise Ship.
So swarmhosts for the win, basically.
Yeah, swarmhost money.
So, have you had a chance to try a little bit of the Legacy of the Void yet?
No, I was not at Blizzcon so I didn't get to try the official alpha build.. But I tried the fan mod some before it was patched. Ravagers were quite broken. But I think if the ravagers stay broken, then the loss of the swarmhosts is no big deal guys. Ravager infestor! Yeah, we got this.
You got this, as long as you have ravagers.
Yeah, ravagers.
In the upcoming year, do you have anything to say to your fans? What should we look out for from Snute?
I'm gonna keep on powering through events and attending a ton of events.
Building swarmhosts?
Building swarmhosts. And I hope that once Legacy is out my games will be even more exciting. But until then I'm working really hard to fix my ZvT right now.
Is there anything specific you're doing to try and practice more ZvT?
Yeah. More custom games. Lots of custom games with Bunny for example. European terrans like uThermal, MarineLord. Yeah. I always ask around for terran practice so Dayshi as well. I'm gonna keep up asking for customs and hopefully that will help my ZvT. And perhaps maybe next year I'll spend more time in Korea just for the sake of practice. But my main focus is still to keep up shape and attend a ton of tournaments. Because there's a lot of foreigners or players in general that don't attend a lot of tournaments and so I think since I have the opportunity to go to tournaments, I just wanna go to as many as possible. Because I enjoy traveling and playing in tournaments and I feel like I do better and better the more tournaments I play in. So you know I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing right now and just be more efficient about it. About everything.
Alright, thank you so much!
