DreamHack Winter 2008 is literally right around the corner and will see a fair few of the top teams from around the world competing in the Counter-Strike 1.6 tournament. With fnaticMSI.CS attending and it being one of the latest major events of the year, I caught up with Oskar "ins" Holm for a...

DreamHack Winter 2008 is literally right around the corner and will see a fair few of the top teams from around the world competing in the Counter-Strike 1.6 tournament.

With fnaticMSI.CS attending and it being one of the latest major events of the year, I caught up with Oskar "ins" Holm for a brief chat and collated his thoughts and opinions on the upcoming task that is DreamHack and whether he thinks they can make their mark on the tournament.

First things first, what are your expectations for this tournament? Who do you think will win?
Well my expectations are always to win so I really hope we step it up this time. We haven't been on our A-game lately but we have changed some things so we will see ;).

What teams do you expect to shine and do you feel there are going to be any surprises like we've seen before?
mTw.dk and mouz are probably the two teams with the best current form but then again we have us, SK, MYM and MiBR so it's really hard to say who shines the most. And for the surprise -- I would say Lanklan because they have been playing well lately and have some crazy, skilled, young players in their roster.

DreamHack is always one of the most important or essential gaming events of the year to many teams and players but what is your general opinion of it being from its homeland Sweden?
DreamHack is always fun as it's nice to meet so many people that are interested in eSports and in the computer lifestyle in general but I don't think it's the optimal venue for eSports, however, it's still an okay event.

Over the course of the year, Fnatic have been somewhat struggling to find consistenty in their performances, why do you think this is?
I think we've been travelling way too much to stay on top lately as there's been so many events going on in eSports so maybe you'll have to prioritize and only go to the events you have prepared for. Then again, CS is a really close game because one or two rounds can decide the whole outcome of the tournament so I don't think we done that bad this year and overall last time we were ranked #1 in the entire world. It's just not possible to win every tournament anymore.

A couple of 7-8th finishes isn't the standard that the public are used to seeing Fnatic play at and you could say that about a 4th place at WEM 2008, too. Do you think Counter-Strike has changed that much that there are no favourites in the game anymore and all the top teams are vulnerable to lose out on top 3 finishes?
I think there's maybe 10 good teams in the world that could win a tournament on any given day I guess and most team games / sports are developing this way when they've been around for a while.

mTw.dk, in most people's minds, are the best team in the world at this particular moment yet it is hard to find a team who is second best with SK Gaming, Meet Your Makers and yourselves all roughly performing at the same level. How long will it take for you guys to regain a dominant position in CS once again?
Time will tell ;).

If your performances as a team continue to be surplus to requirements (not good enough) would you be expecting any line-up changes in the team, as the scene keeps suggesting your team needs or do you feel you need more time?
Of course if we don't perform good enough over a certain timespan we'll have to talk about it and maybe make line-up changes if that's the problem so we'll see what happens during silly season.

What has your preparation been like for this event? Have you been bootcamping or running any special / new tactics?
We have only been playing online almost every day to get in shape and we have some new strategies coming up, so stay tuned to HLTV.

Any last words?
Thanks all our fans for supporting us and thanks for the interview.

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