PRESS CONFERENCE WITH PGS POKERSTRATEGY.CC
Event: Electronic Sports World Cup - Xfire at ESWC microsite
July 8th 2007
Location: Paris, France

Team PGS, from Poland, are right off the stage where they won the Electronic Sports World Cup 2007 Counter-Strike final, taking the World Title and USD 40,000 home. Following is the transcript for the press conference set up by Xfire.


Can you tell us a bit about the game?
Taz: For a start, we played train. We were confident as CT. We won the pistol. On nuke, I don't know what to say. We lost against fnatic, we lost T side. Something went wrong. I don't know what it was. NoA was amazing. On Inferno it was clear that every round counts and we played our game.

What would you want to say to your opponents. They played very well on the second map, their skill seemed to come to a new level on that map?
Taz: Of course, we respect them, they are a hard team. They were amazing, we really respect them.

To the PGS manager, you watched the whole game, what can you say about every one of your players?
To start from the left: Luq was a key player, a lot of important shots, neo was amazing in 1 on 3. Taz was amazing on nuke, kuben was nice, loord was another clutch player.

Based on this great victory here in Paris, what will be your next achievement?
We might come back to Poland and leave to game union next week. Next should be WCG. We will try to win it again.

A lot of teams will be waiting for you, will this change anything for your team or your mental state?
As far as I can judge it, that doesn't matter. we try to play our game and we need to stay focused. If we stay focused, we can do it.

I think that this year, ESWC was really Polish. What is so special with E-sport in Poland that made you so strong this year?
We have the best internet connection in the world. =)

To be honest, it's a lot of dedication .. avek (2007 Quake 4 Champion) is a skilled player and if you have a strong sponsor, you can go very far.

We brought this up on the last press conference, but just to clarify. There is still a lot of people calling you Pentagram, what do you really want to be called?

The team name for this year is PGS Pokerstrategy.cc and we play under the tag of our sponsor. So no more Pentagram.

Danger[BE]: Why were there so many pauses?
I don't know why we had so many pauses, we had a lot of problems with our computers and it was a tough match, we needed the pauses.

You showed a solid performance this year, do you think that you will build up a domination in the game like SK did in 2003?
I think that after today, we have some kind of domination. There are strong teams, mibr, NoA took a map from us. You cannot compare it, as there is much more competition.

NoA had a lot of supporters, but you had your corner of fans, how important is it to see that you are supported, and how does it affect your game style?
Well, first of all, we really appreciate the support of our fans. It was amazing! Thanks guys. NoA were the underdogs and many people cheered for them... but as you can see they were no underdogs after all.

Which one of you is single?
Taz: Well, we are progamers, so we have our CS only. =D

(>SpRaY<LoW:iPod .LtG: How do you prepare for something this big? Playing for the title "World Champion" and $40,000?
Well, we were practicing for about 2 weeks and played the whole day. It was in a bootcamp and made tactics and played online with mibr. The best for such an event is a bootcamp in Sweden, as the internet connection is very good and we can play online on LAN conditions.

After losing the second map second overtime 3-0, was it hard to keep your focus on the last map?
Well, I don't think so. We were pretty confident that we were gonna win, but we lost nuke. We believe in ourselves and you need to believe in your skill.

Koen: Is the pressure in overtime higher or not?
We made a lot of mistakes but the pressure wasn't higher in the overtime as we know that in case of a loss we had the third map. After the time there was not more pressure, we had to restore the communication we had on Inferno.

Once again, congratulations PGS PokerStrategy.cc, and good luck in the future.