After the expected success in the group stage, Na’Vi player Arseniy ‚esenin‘ Trynozhenko talks to readmore.de about his impressions of GameGune 2011, the benefits of founding their own organization Na’Vi gaming and his plans for the future.
readmore.de: You just finished group stage without any problems. Did you expect more resistance?
Arseniy ‚esenin‘ Trynozhenko: Naah, we did not expect any problems, because all the teams are not on the top of Counter-Strike. Only k1ck from Portugal is maybe a Top10 team in Europe. In the end, it was really easy for us.
You are going to face the interesting teams tomorrow. Who do you consider as the most dangerous team for you?
I think from tomorrow’s day, every opponent will be really interesting. There will be the French team or fnatic for us, then Moscow Five or the Swedish ESC and then the final with SK Gaming. So every team is really strong and every match will be really interesting.So you expect SK in the final against you.
Yeah, I think they will take first place in their group and then move to the Winner Bracket where we will face them in the finals.
You lost against them on DreamHack. What did you do to prevent another loss? Any anti-strats?
No, of course not. We just prepared some new strategies, we practised a lot, we played a lot of CSDM with bots, we have a good aim. So the match against SK Gaming will be very hard for us, but nobody knows who will win.
You got some major problems on de_nuke. Did you do anything special on de_nuke since it’s the map of the Winner Bracket final?
We did not play that map for one year and some few months. We just started to play that map recently and there sure is a lot of problems on that map. But we practised it every day and watched some demos. I think in future, de_nuke can be one of our good maps.
Really?
Well, it’s still really hard to play it agaist Swedish or Polish teams, because they played that map about five or six years straight, that’s hard for us to catch up. But the match in the Winner Bracket final will be good, I think.
On the next events there are new maps to be played. Did you already practise de_mirage and de_forge?
No, we did not. Our main goal was the GameGune, but after this event we will start playing these maps. It’s kind of an absurde situation, when you have to play seven maps. It is really hard to practise all the map. In future, probably every team will have to pick two or three maps, they did not practise a lot and the factor of luck will be a stronger element of Counter-Strike.So, you are not really a big fan of the new map pool.
I do like the new maps, I already know them, but I’m not really a big fan of this decision. You must play Counter-Strike not eight hours a day now, but you must play ten or twelve hours a day to be prepared on these maps as well.
Are you ready and willing to spend this amount of time with Counter-Strike?
For sure we are. It is our work and we have to show good results for our sponsors and our fans.
All of you play CS as full-time job. Is there any backup plan, if there is no more Counter-Strike in future?
I think, in future we will all work for our project Na’Vi-Gaming. If we won’t play Counter-Strike for ourselves, we will help other players. Maybe in future there will be a game like Counter-Strike 2 and maybe we will show good results in that game as well.
Could you tell us a little about your organization? Recently, you expanded to a lot of other games like Starcraft 2 or DotA.
Well, of course it’s our plan to create a big organization like SK Gaming or fnatic. But this is really hard to realize in the Ukraine, because the budgets of big companies for cybersport teams are really small. They don’t know anything about cybersports. In Western Europe you can easily take ten to fifteen thousand Euros from your main sponsor. In the Ukraine you can’t even make 2,000 Euros for that. But I think, we are going in the right direction. Right now we have small players in Starcraft, but they will grow up. You might have heard that HappyZerg is going to Korea for one month to practise. This will help the player and in future he will show us good results.You had offers from other European clans as well to join their organization.
Yeah.
Would you have earned more money?
At first, yes. But it’s always better to make your own organization. You’re not like puppets. Teams like SK Gaming can kick RobbaN or GeT_RighT and take other players instead. In this team, we are the bosses and we decide who stays and who does not. First of all, big thanks to Arbalet. When we had the opportunity to join another clan, we asked him for advice. He told us, not to do it – instead he would help us. So thanks to him, we could found our own project. And now we have great sponsors like Steel Series, Kaspersky, GameFrag or Antec who support us.
What do you think about the event itself? Your matches do not really get much attention. There are around ten spectators – what do you think about this?
This is not a big deal for us. It’s about our sport, that you could watch anything on the internet. The GameGune itself is better than in the previous years because of the computers. The computers here are a bit better than usual. I think in the future spectators will also join the tournament. But usually, the entrance fee of 40 Euros to watch some boring groupstage matches is a bit too much. Probably some people will come for the finals.
But you do prefer the big events with crowds of spectators?
Yeah, of course. A lot of spectators is one more factor in Counter-Strike. Maybe some players get more nervous than always. But for us, it is not really a big deal. We can play here and we can play on the big events.
Thank you for the interview.


