Beyond the Gamer - Shadow

Do you ever find that your fans are a bit too "persistent"? Have you ever been approached on the street by someone who only knows you as "Shadow"?

My fans are all ok! :)


How does your roster look like at the moment?

Current team: Bandi Dece Ferdi Sedan and me.


What place is Eq aiming for and who do you think will be your hardest opponents this year?

Of course we're aiming to win all competitions, and I hope for Eq to become very strong so that there won't be any major threat from other teams. But surely TeG will be our strongest adversaries as always.


Can you take out some sequences from a game or two that were really important? Maybe some from the recently ended WCG 2007 qualifier?

On inferno, against IGG, when we were terrorists, I threw a flashbang that blinded Sedan, and if I had not done that, he would have killed 2 of them from behind and most likely we wouldn't have had to play a second map in the grand final.


It seems like you have practised a lot, and prepared well. I have heard some rumours that Eq haven't really practised much at all, can you tell us something about this?

As you well know Sedan left TeG and came back to us just 2 weeks before the competition, we didn't have time to practice and we didn't. Out of the 10 days we had available, we only trained on 6 of them. So not that much...


What were Eq's first ambitions for this season of PGL National Championship? What are your ambitions now? Do you think you can get into top3 at the end?

From the beginning, I knew we could win! Now with a little luck we can still win the league, if we beat TeG in PGL we will take at least second.


Can you tell us a bit about the structure in Eq-Gaming?

Well about the structure of the organization, we have a manager, Rhythmiser, he's been handling things very well, AsRoma is also helping and constantly updating the esports movie section, Dezaxat has been designing the article banners on our website for two months now, Evil is our moviemaker, SpyGun is our CS scene writer and Nasty is the head of the news and coverage crew. With this occasion I would like to thank everyone for all their hard work and supporting us all this time!


Are you worried about getting too old for this game? Or this lifestyle?

Not really, most players are around 20-24 years old, maybe in a couple of years I'll worry about that.


In my opinion you always get stuck with the really hard positions that require tremendous playing IQ and overview. Would you personally use those terms to describe your positions and play style?

We don't have a fixed playing style that we use every match, we just play depending on our opponent and we try hard to figure out their own style very fast so that we can defeat them easily.


How many hours per week do you practice?

Around 20 hours.


At the moment, how do you mix up the real life with the online life? Is it difficult?

You must not mix them.


Do you think that you spend too much time on the computer?

Sometimes, yes.


Did you ever play CS:Source? What do you think about this game?

I have never played CS:S, but it seems it will replace CS1.6 sometime in the future!


Describe your mates shortly and briefly with a few words of your choice.

Dece is a very aggressive player, SeDaN is probably the best aimer from Romania, Ferdilicious is the calm one in the team and BANDI is simply the best player ever!


What does the future look like for you? Do you plan to keep playing together?

I want us to stay together and try to win all that there is to win!


What do you do when you're not practicing with Eq? Mix? FFA? Gathers? Something else?

Usually gathers or aim maps.