Ilyes "Stephano" Satouri is the star of the 55th episode of my 'Grilled' interview series. The French Zerg star is the first return guest of the feature.
Some of the topics discussed:
- Stephano's poor string of results since Dreamhack Winter.
- His safe style and decision to broadcast to opponents that he will play this way.
- How far ahead he plans in games, strategically.
- The GSL World Championship four kill.
- The differences between Western and Eastern cultures.
- The player he'd like to beat due to that opponent being a "prick".
Why he still uses the old school inject method:
"I'm lazy, that's it. I don't think I have lost any, maybe a few, games, but everyone knows that I'm not a hard worker. So for a minor detail like that I'm not motivated enough to put time to work on that, sadly."
Thoughts on imbalance:
"Let's say I have so much experience on StarCraft2 now that I can, I do, know when there's something imbalanced. I don't lie to myself, I don't deny it. Right now is balanced, in my opinion, except Swarmhost, which is too against Protoss, and the hellbats, being too strong right now for its cost and supply."
Whether it was his idea to go to Korea:
"EG didn't force me to go to Korea, nobody forced me. I did want to go and give it a try, maybe I stayed too long. Basically there were no tournaments for a two month period, and I didn't have a PC at home, so I thought maybe I should stay in Korea, have the best practice I could get and then go to the tournaments and own everything. But I didn't really think about feeling homesick or something like that, so it was a bad mistake for me, but we learn from our mistakes I guess."
Koreans being perceived as harder workers than foreigners:
"I guess it's cultural and about education. I don't think Koreans are [naturally] especially hard workers, it's just that they've been raised in a way that if you don't work hard you get nothing in life. For foreigners usually it's a bit easier, the parents don't ask a lot from their children, they let them live the life they want. I don't think in Korea you ever have gap years, but in Europe we have stuff like that, so these things make us look lazy on the scene, but it's just about culture and education."
The entire 25m08s video interview can be watched at Team Acer.