Dosia: "I think NiP will soon lose"

As part of our pre-coverage of Copenhagen Games, we sat down with Virtus.pro member Mihail "Dosia" Stolyarov and picked the brain of the Russian ace.

The Russia-based team have in the past months established themselves as a top contender, with big performances and convincing results in both online and LAN tournaments.

Copenhagen Games will, however, be the first major international tournament outside of CIS for Virtus.pro, who were forced last week to pull out of the ESEA finals because of visa problems.

Fresh off a runners-up finish at TECHLABS, Virtus.pro have secured direct entry into Copenhagen Games' main tournament, so they will only have to play on Friday.

In this interview, Stolyarov talks about Virtus.pro's preparations for the Danish event, what went wrong at TECHLABS, and his expectations about CS:GO, among other topics.

How have you prepared for Copenhagen Games? Have you bootcamped or only practiced online?

We are bootcamping right now in Kiev. We have been practicing here for 10 days, with a small break for TECHLABS Cup in Moscow. We would like to thank Virtus.pro and CyberArena for making this possible.

Going into the tournament, who do you think that will be the biggest threats to your team?

There will be a lot of strong teams visiting Copenhagen. The most important task for us will be to play our game. If we manage to do it, we can perform really well. I hope we can really do it.

With Virtus.pro being one of the most experienced and in-form teams in Copenhagen, how far do you think that you can go in the tournament?

I think it will depend on the bracket. If there are no surprises I think we will at least reach the semi-finals.

At TECHLABS, your team did extremely well against ESC Gaming but still fell short against Ninjas in Pyjamas. Do you think that NiP are still one step ahead?

NiP know almost everything there is to know about CS:GO, but as we have seen in the last big LAN tournaments they have had some difficult situations. This has happened more often in the last two or three months. I think they will soon lose because every streak ends someday, but they are still great now.

Dosia playing for Nostalgie at Mad Catz Vienna

In the Grand Final, it really looked like you could take the game to a second map after going up 7-3 as CT on dust2. What went wrong in the rest of the game, especially in the second half, in which you played as Terrorist?

NiP won very important 2v2 and 2v3 rounds, which really broke our spirit and made us feel less of a team. I hope that this was the last time where we lost control of a game that was going so comfortable for us. We will pay attention to this aspect of the game.

Your team is without a doubt the strongest side in all of CIS right now. What do you think that the secret is?

We began playing CS:GO before Na´Vi and now we play CS:GO better than we did in 1.6. Our good matches are only the result of our hard work and the good relations we have in the team.

Na´Vi switched almost as the same time as your team and they seem to be a lot behind. What is the problem with them? Were you disappointed with their performances at TECHLABS?

They can play much better than they did at TECHLABS. We had some close matches against them in SLTV StarSeries, so I know they are not bad. I hope they will fix some things before the trip to Denmark.

You switched to CS:GO in October, joining RuSh3D, but only days later you and your brother moved to Virtus.pro. Was it hard to leave behind your place2play.ru team-mates ROMJkE and hally? What made you and your brother switch teams?

To be honest, switching to CS:GO was easy. ROMJkE decided to step down from eSports, so we could not continue with that lineup. After that, we joined Virtus.pro and the team started showing some good results.

Virtus.pro at TECHLABS

Last week it was announced that your team will not be able to attend the ESEA-Invite finals due to visa problems. What was the issue here, exactly? Did you apply for a visa too late?

I only had one empty Visa page on my passport. This is no big deal, unless you are a Russian citizen who wants to visit the United States. They can deny your application if they do not like your picture. It takes up to two months to get a new passport here, so if we continued the application process, it would be rejected. That is why we had to skip the event.

How big of a blow is it that you will not be able to play at this exclusive event? Do you fear not being able to take part in the next Invite season?

We would like to play the next ESEA season and I hope the organisers will let us play in the league. Next time we will try to make it to the LAN finals.

We have a lot of LAN events coming up, like Mad Catz Birmingham, ESEA, SLTV and EMS. At the end of the year, we will have Game Evolution’s $40,000 tournament. Do you think that CS:GO is finally starting to gain some steam?

We have a lot of CS:GO tournaments right now, even more than we did in CS 1.6 back in 2011. We are slowly merging the two communities, and many have changed their mind about CS:GO. I hope we will have many great events and that the number of fans will continue to grow. Big events like DreamHack, SLTV, ESWC and many others can only help this to happen.

Thank you for this interview. Is there anything that you would like to add?

I would like to thank our fans and everyone who has supported us in our matches and in other activities. Special thanks go to Virtus.pro, for planning well our events and bootcamps. I would also like to thank our main sponsors, BenQ and Gametrix.

Stay tuned to HLTV.org as we will bring you all the action from Copenhagen Games, live from Øksnehallen.