KaiR0N-: "We feel like it's a usual tournament; there's nothing special that people do for us"

His BetBoom side have come under fire after receiving an invite to FISSURE's BetBoom-sponsored event.

BetBoom's attendance at BetBoom Dacha has been the subject of controversy due to the same bookmaker owning the squad and naming rights for FISSURE's tournament.

Against GamerLegion, that controversy threatened to boil over. According to Aleksandr "⁠zorte⁠" Zagodyrenko on Telegram, BetBoom's opponents wanted to flip coins for which stage setup was to be used (after all four games were won by the team on the right-hand side), and turn off Steam overlay to prevent any communication, as is standard tournament practice.

This extended the technical pause preceding the match, which eventually began after 22:00 local time and saw BetBoom run out as the winners.

We spoke to Aleksandr "⁠KaiR0N-⁠" Anashkin in an explosive interview about their struggles on day one, why "it helped that we played against [GamerLegion] and not against any other team in the world," and his thoughts on playing in a BetBoom-sponsored event.

---

Win over GamerLegion, give me your initial thoughts after that.

Nothing really special, we just won a game. Yesterday, we played really bad, I'm not going to say some bad words over here, but we played really bad. Today it was a bit better, and I'm pretty hyped that we won over GamerLegion because I'm not going to explain the whole thing but the way they played in practice they would never play it on official, and that made us a bit evil. That made us a bit hungry for this win, it definitely helped us today. We were hyped, we were screaming more than usual and blablabla. It definitely helped that we played against them and not against any other team in the world.

Tell me a bit more about yesterday, a few man advantages thrown away, little things like that, what did you change coming into today?

Yesterday it wasn't about our game in my honest opinion. It was just our mentality and stuff, we lost to ourselves. We didn't even join the server. I know that might sound cocky or something, but that's actually true. We didn't let ourselves play at all, we didn't let ourselves have the duels we usually have in practice, we didn't let ourselves shoot, basically. We just got lost in our minds, so that's it probably.

On GamerLegion, I think it was zorte who posted on Telegram, about the technical pause at the start of the game, something about swapping PCs. Can you comment on any of that?

Yeah, it was weird. First of all when we were about to start, we had a few technical issues on our side but it was basic. Config issues on zorte's side, and an admin was checking it out so it was okay. We just needed ten more minutes. But, in just one moment, three of us had already joined the server, and they told admins to block our in-game Steam overlay because they thought there was a chance somebody was going to write info in Steam to us so we're going to snipe them some way, or something like that I don't know. They definitely asked to block our Steam in any way.

Do you see why it's standard practice to block Steam? For you guys as well, you want to eliminate any chance of people thinking there's a conflict there, right?

That was okay for us, we were fine with that. But, that showed us that they weren't as confident as we thought in the beginning. If you're confident you won't be asking for multiple things from the administration, that's the only thing. They wanted it, so they got it so it's like fine. Everybody checked that, none of us were against it. They could come and check our PCs to see if the overlay works or not. I see why they asked somebody to come and do that because we're the home team, let's say like that I don't know, at least they might think so. I don't know where it came from, but we did it so it was okay for us. They did what they wanted.

Does it add any pressure, being that "home team" like you said? Normal teams, at map point, there's one or two cameras but when you guys are playing there's four, the boom mic comes over, things like that. Is there any pressure being the BetBoom team at the BetBoom tournament?

Not really, we feel like it's a usual tournament. Like everyone here, there's nothing special that people do to us. Maybe there are a few more of our staff than usual, but it's most likely not just because it's the tournament organizer, it's because there's no Dota tournament so none of our staff is with the Dota team. Everyone came here. That's the only difference between the staff we had in Sydney or Belgrade than we have here. Basically, nothing changed, we have the same people we've known for some time, and they're all coming to us doing the same job as usual. Pretty much nothing changed.

Moving onto the next few games, what are you seeing as success in this tournament?

I'm not sure, I'm trying to move step by step if that's possible. This way I see that we could have played better in the first match and right now since we kind of found our game, I'm not sure how we're going to play in the next match. If we play at least something like we played today we're not going to get 0-2'd. We should have a competitive game, I hope for that at least. If we lose in a close game, a 2-1, it wouldn't be a big disappointment.