Interview with Breakthedesk of Gambit Gaming: How he got there, the team's future, & more

NAME: Arthur "breakthedesk" Cechladze
COUNTRY: Denmark
TEAM: Gambit Gaming
ROLE: Editor-in-Chief 
 

 

First of all, thank you for doing the interview. How is the team's mentality with the departure of Alex Ich? Is the team atmosphere still healthy? How has the spirit changed within the team?

Hello! The pleasure is mine. To be honest, I didn't really get a chance to talk to them about it, but from what I know it was a good wake-up call for them. The only person I talked about it was Edward, who informed me as soon as Alex Ich got in touch with him. He was crushed by Alex's decision and seemed to be almost desperate at that moment, but he managed to pull himself together.

How long have you been working with the team? Is the relationship purely business-related or are you close friends with the players on the team?

Ironically, we joined Moscow Five almost at the same time. I think I was recruited about a week before them to do Dota 2 coverage. I am aware of their terrible schedule, therefore I try to avoid taking away their spare time on a daily basis, so I mostly talk to them at the events I am attending.

The only exception is Edward, in fact, he was the first to get in touch with me back when they joined M5. We chat from time to time and he invites me to play, when he is playing with his Twitch subs.

Having said that it is obvious that our relationship are leaning more towards being purely work- oriented, but I enjoy travelling to events to get to know them a little better. I believe I've been mostly spending time with Edward and Alex, since they are/were the most outgoing guys in our team.

What do you think has changed within how the team operates since you've joined it from the beginning to, say, Season 3, to now? Any key differences between different time periods?

It's hard to say exactly, since I barely see them, but I feel like they became devasted from LCS and it indeed had a huge negative impact on them. Unfortunately, since our staff was limited up until January 2014, Groove had a burden of both managing organization and taking care of them on a daily basis.

I think it is safe to say that their most recent downfall started when he decided to stop travelling to Cologne with them to focus on his personal life and achieving more global organizational goals. They lost the magic "Gambit bootcamp" that was able to aid them previously, when there were no regular LCS games. Now, when they have an analyst, I feel like they are doing better.

For a very long period of time their playstyle was fairly predictable, yet very few teams were able to abuse it, so our guys tended to come on top due to their unique personal understanding of the game and ability to teamfight.

I think Fnatic were the first to learn how to counter it. Now it seems that they are working towards expanding their pool of strategies and becoming more methodical, so they don't have to rely on snowballing their early leads or turtling until the certain point of the game to make a comeback in a big teamfight.

While M5/Gambit has always been regarded as a powerhouse, fans couldn't really connect to the team on a personal level. Explain the part you played on publicizing the team and allowing them to show their personalities and giving the team character.

Back in M5 I mostly focused on covering Dota 2 and taking care of Dota 2 team's online schedule, so I didn't have the time left to promote our LoL team. First of all, I wasn't that much into League, since I was a veteran Dota player.

Secondly, up until August 2012 M5 had only a Russian page. Thirdly, I was still a novice: I had no previous experience of working in eSports, even though I've been following it since 2005/2006, so I was still learning. Though I should say I had a unique opportunity to learn from the best Russian speaking eSports veterans: Groove and Marchello.

Things changed when our post-TI2 Dota 2 roster disbanded and League became our only discipline. At that point I was considering my options: should I commit to the game I prefer or should I move on with the guys (players and Groove) whom I have worked for and cared about for almost a year? I made a decision to stay with them and to get acquainted with the League community.

Nevertheless, I was still tempted to do something Dota 2 oriented and posted some content on joinDOTA for a month or two. It was a valuable lesson, because it allowed me to realize how important for me personally is to stick to people I was connected to. The very first tournament I focused on was IPL5. I still remember spending three nights in a row at campus, since my connection at home was really bad at the time. Since then I believe I have accumulated a solid knowledge of LoL as a game and as a competitive scene and managed to catch up on the events I missed in the past.

I think there were two turning points for us in terms of coverage. First of all, by joining Gambit we walked away from prioritizing Russian speaking community and started focusing on addressing our international fans by becoming more active on social networks. The second point was post-S3WC. You should give a lot of credit to Groove actually, since he realized that we have to change our approach and make use of entertaining content. I also realized how important it is to track what's trending on Reddit to be able to cater to the needs of our fans and community in general.

As for myself, I try to come up with ideas for content that can be published on a regular basis, for instance, analysis, Gambit Weekly, Gambit Gamers. It is important to have a certain framework that can be maintained no matter what is is happening in the scene at a given point of time.

To be fair, now it's becoming increasingly difficult to provide unique content, since constant streams of LCS are playing a huge role in familiarizing audience with the pros, so others are running out of options. On top of that I try to improve my skills as a player and I follow NA, EU and Korea on a regular basis to be aware of trends, events, opinions, etc. to shape up my content.

I realize that I am not the most entertaining person, therefore I try to fish for their in-depth insights on relevant topics at a given point of time.

So you said you try to improve your skills as a player. How much time do you invest into the game personally and would you mind sharing you rank with the world?

I started playing actively in August 2013. I try to play at least a game per day to mantain my mechanics, but I'd say that on average I play around 15-20 games per week.

I am currently Platinum IV on EUW and my highest rank was Platinum II this season. I am very streaky player, I can stay within the same league for a month and then move up two ranks in a space of two-three days.

 Same goes for losing ranks as well :( For a person doing content related to the competitive scene I try to play all roles to gain an understanding of both macro strategy and lane match-ups. It helps in improving my general understanding of competitive play and I use to gain the most out of interviews I conduct with our players.

On top of public relations, what are some other duties you have within the team? Can you walk us through your average day?

As I have mentioned before I try to soak up everything that's going on in the competitive scene and on Reddit. In terms of my immediate duties, I am making updates on our social networks, processing responses from our players for our own columns and other parties, i.e., translating interviews and statements. I am taking care of the website and updating our coverage in general. Even though I am not artistically gifted, I try to come up with concepts and ideas for our videos and comics.

Do you have any influence on behavioral punishment involed with the team? For example, if the team gets complacent or doesn't train hard enough, or maybe Genja uses suboptimal builds, do you have any say in what they do? Are there any ultimatums you enforce?

I have nothing to do with their training and performance. It's covered by their analyst and Groove. Since I am better at League than Groove I tend to share my opinion as a spectator with him on their performance, but no more than that.

Do you ever have regrets of choosing what you currently do rather than shooting to be a professional gamer yourself? You seem to be pretty passionate about the prospect of gaming at the highest level itself.

Well, I was playing DotA competitively for about two years on a local level in Latvia. I think it is fair to say that I was amongst the best players in Latvia in that period of time (2006-2008 if I recall correctly), but I didn't manage to find people who were as passionate about it as myself. I had a couple of guys whom I formed mix teams for local LAN and online tournaments.

We did fairly well, almost always placing top3 and we even won one. There was only one team from Latvia that achieved something in DotA at that time. They qualified for ASUS, but couldn't attend it, and later on two of them were even signed by Dignitas! My parents weren't supportive of me playing, so I couldn't play scrims or online tournaments.

The problem was that I was supposed to move to Copenhagen to pursue undergraduate and graduate education, so I basically was barely playing for two years - final year of highschool and my first year in Copenhagen.

It was hard for me to even dream of it after such a long break, because I wasn't on par and it was too late for me to start investing a lot of time all over again, because I had to focus on building networking in Copenhagen, taking care of paper work, finding a job, studying, etc.

I am pleased with what I do now and am looking forward to being involved with competitive eSports later on even in my spare time, if I don't manage kick-start my post-academic career within the field of eSports.

If Gambit Gaming were theoretically to drop out of the LCS, what direction would you and the team go? Would you compete in Challenger Series, consider disbanding, switching rosters? Explain.

Hard to say really. It comes down to whether players have the motivation to claw their way back. The problem in CIS is that LoL is rather unpopular and is way behind of Dota 2. Well, CIS historically has produced a lot of top notch DotA and Dota 2 players.

Local leagues are only beginning to appear so it will take at least a year from now for Russian speaking players to potentially develop to become World class players - the talent pool is very limited. If it comes down to roster changes if we fall down to CS, we should ask ourselves a question: Do we want to maintain a Russian speaking roster and develop upcoming Russian speaking players ourselves or should we become an international team.

From my understanding, Gambit as an organization has long-term goals and will stick around no matter whether we have this roster or not. From an organizational perspective we have to develop our own brand and to gain a recognition from the community, so our fans don't abandon us.

Players will leave the team or will quit altogether sooner or later, but I hope that our guys will stick together for now.

In all honesty, how's the relationship between the team and Alex now? Was it kind of unexpected and the team is bitter about it, or did you guys part ways on a good note?

I don't really know to be honest, but I`ll try to shed some light on it, because I am planning to attend LCS at one point in June. I understand his reasoning, family and all, but I find it disturbing that he had no faith in our team getting to Worlds. Spring Split wasn't a blast for us, but in my view it would make much more sense for him to leave after Worlds, but who am I to judge? I respect his decision.

Once again, Thank you for the interview. Is there anything else you'd like to express or any shoutouts you'd like to make before we close this out?

Shoutout to the Latvian community and to Gambit's fans. I am really grateful to guys who check our content - getting positive feedback is the biggest joy for content creators :) Shoutout to GosuGamers - I enjoyed working with your tournament admins and editors in the past ;)

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=QUICKFIRE QUESTIONS=

Favorite Food: Homemade
Favorite Animal: Our Zwergschnauzer in Riga
Most memorable Tournament / Match for the team: Overcoming MYM at IEM Katowice'13
Biggest fear: Spiders
Favorite Music: Hard Rock / Metal
Prefered Hobby: Procrastination

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