An Interview with BlinG, the ESET UK Masters Champion

I catch up with Team Dignitas player Samayan 'BlinG' Kay after his recent victory at the Multiplay Insomnia Gaming Festival where he took out Andreas "KrasS" Ullrich in convincing 3:0 fashion! We discuss the tournament itself and the future of Starcraft 2.

Congratulations on your recent win at ESET UK Masters Grand Finals! I believe this is the second time you’ve won an iSeries. How different is it competing on home turf compared to flying out to different countries?

BlinG: Thank you! It seems a lot more relaxed to me I guess. I don't have to worry about travelling too far, adjusting to jetlag and such. So yeah, it makes things a lot more easier for me which probably allows me to concentrate and play better overall. The UK support is always nice too!

 

During the first game the advantage seemed to swing back and forth. After a failed marine push early game KrasS managed to gain a 40 supply advantage after some multi-drop play. Were you still confident you could pull it back at this point? What was your plan at that moment?

BlinG: Not really no, I thought I was getting completely destroyed and thought the game was over, but wanted to stay in the game anyway and fight till I was completely dead just so I could get used to the mouse a little more. But then after I started taking everything into account I realised  he was killing a lot of my workers, but not really picking apart my army too much, so I still had a fairly sizable army and, on top of that, my upgrades were super far ahead.

Once he stopped the drop play aggression I knew the only way to make it back into the game was to take advantage of my upgrades and counter-attack him which ended up more or less evening the workers lost count. I could go into the late game with a pretty big lead, after that it was fairly straight forward.

 

After game one what was your plan for game two? Did you expect the heavy drop play we saw to happen again? Midgame you cancelled blink research to build a DT shrine. This seemed to work to your advantage later, why did you make this decision?

BlinG: My plan was to just play the same style as it worked pretty well in the previous game, even with all the damage I took, so I knew if I could narrow down my mistakes. I'd be able to take the next map in the same kind of fashion. I made the DT shrine because obviously things didn't go to plan and I ended up taking a lot of damage from his drop play like I did on the first map; I needed a way to even things out and you know what they say, "When behind, Dark Shrine!".

 

Game three was much more one sided with a great 5 gate build. Why did you pick this build for the last game? How did you feel once you knew you’d broken his defense at the natural and won the series?

BlinG: Something in the back of my head was just telling me to do it, after playing macro in the first two games, I thought I'd change things up also, and yeah, it seemed to work pretty well. It felt pretty awesome, I didnt expect to win the tournament at all so the fact that I did it was an awesome surprise for me.

You looked pretty chilled during the iSeries final. How do you prepare for offline events like these and the psychological pressures that come with them?

BlinG: I don't prepare psychologically. All the experience I've gathered through playing offline tournaments all adds up for me and the more I play in them the more relaxed I get.

 

You were lucky, or unlucky, enough to have to play all three PvX matchups on your way to the title; which matchups are you enjoying or feel particularly strong in at the moment? There’s a lot of talk about late-game PvZ and how it tends to favour Zerg once they get their BL/Infestor army out. How did you approach your PvZ against team-mate JonnyReco?

BlinG: I enjoy PvP the most, purely because it's not as coinflippy as it used to be and usually the better player will win in a BoX series. Against JonnyREco I knew how he played so I could use that to my advantage. I struggle a lot against zerg in macro games due to what you just mentioned so I just played as many aggressive builds as I could which ended up working out pretty nicely.

 

We finally have a release date for HotS. Are you looking forward to the release? How do you think it will affect competitive SC2, will it act as a sort of reset or do you think players will easily transfer their skill over?

BlinG: I'm really looking forward to it, especially after the patch notes that just got released today, it seems like the game is going to change into a completely different one which is what most people, especially me, wanted. I think the top players will still stay at the top but they wont be as dominate as they are in WoL and we'll see some new faces around for sure.

Has your practice regime changed since you began playing professionally? Do you tailor your practice to specific events that are incoming or do you just try and improve all matchups consistently?

BlinG: If I have specific players to practice for then I'll try and practice that match up over the others but yeah, my main focus is to improve all matchups constantly and keep them all on par so if one is lagging, then I'll usually concentrate on that more than the others until I'm equal with my other match ups.

 

What are your plans for the remainder of the year and for the months leading up to the HotS release?

BlinG: I'll practice WoL for one more tournament this year then I think after that I'll make the switch over to HotS as I havent got round to playing the BETA yet and I'd like to catch up with everyone else or even have an advantage over the others by the time its released properly.

 

Thanks for your time and congratulations once again! Any shout outs you’d like to make?

BlinG: Thanks for the interview! I'd like to give a Shoutout to Karen Kay, Cyncial Brit/Total Biscuit, Odee and all of our sponsors, Intel, Iiyama, Alienware, Antec, Scan, Creative, Qpad, Killer, Western Digital, Initial Games and Twitch TV!

 

Interview by Matthew Evans, @MevsStarcraft

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