hooch: "electronic can become big"

The Russian mix-team around Dmitry "⁠hooch⁠" Bogdanov got their first win in their very first match, as .Russia upset Virtus.pro in a double overtie battle on Cobblestone.

We got a hold of the in-game leader to find out how the mix was put together and what their goals are. hooch also shared his thoughts on the upset and his hopes for Denis "⁠electroNic⁠" Sharipov's future:

There are a lot of mixteams present, you being one of them, how was .Russia put together and by whom?

Originally, we were supposed to play with a mixteam consisting of Gambit and FlipSid3 players, but after a while we changed spaze for Kucher and played the qualifier with electronic, kucher, worldedit and dosia. Because of personal issues Dosia couldn't come and two days before the event Kucher said he has passport problems and he wouldn't be able to come here. So we took two players from Preparation, jmqa and ub1que. We didn't practice, because there was a big event in Russia, but everyone is in shape.

With that in mind, what are the goals for this event?

Coming to this event is a big opportunity to participate in a really huge event, maybe the biggest out there, so expectations are always the same, to play our best and see how it goes. Yeah, we beat Virtus.pro today, but if we think we made something big today, we'll suffer tomorrow and lose all games, so we just need chill a little bit and make tomorrow even more important. The VP win could make people think we're strong but then we lose once and we could be third or out. We didn't do anything yet, so our goal is to try to win every match.

Your only match today ended quite surprisingly, especially since it was on Cobblestone where Virtus.pro is considered the best team in the world by most, what were the keys to win?

I played Virtus.pro a lot recently, I played them three times at ELEAGUE and once at DreamHack Bucharest and we played Cobble. So I knew how they'd play and we started quite good, had a 10-5 half, but then we lost pistols and choked a lot during the game. Especially in overtime, we were up 3-0 twice and we almost threw it away, but I'm proud of the boys that they didn't falter and continued to play well, so I'd like to highlight all players who played this game, because everyone did their job to get this win.

For the last question I want to ask about electronic, he's been probably the biggest up-and-comer in the CIS region for a while now, what do you think he can do in the future? What can he do for FlipSid3?

I played with him in a team before I joined Gambit and he was a really promising player. We managed to beat HR and other teams sometimes, and he always played good and is a talented guy, but he still needs to work on his game and his personality. I hope B1ad3 will make him a really great player, he just needs to use his talent in the right way. I really hope so, because he's one of the few Russian players who can become really big. Like I said, he has big potential, but he needs to work on it a lot.