Why don't you tell us a little bit about the new 4 Kings. Who are you?

The team consists of me [lurppis], Kuppi, natu, SPIKEONE & toomi. I believe everyones already familiar with the first four, while toomi is still relatively unknown. He played for Logitech.fi in the beginning of 2007 but had to quit in order to finish his final exams and then did his military service in January-July, but he's back now.
 
The players are no strangers to each other, do you think this will help in your training?

Obviously it will help to some extent but it's still a totally new team and we will have to start everything from the scratch, so at the end of the day it won't have a huge impact.

What will be the first event spectators can hope to see you at?

We already attended the Finnish WCG qualifier on the past weekend in Helsinki, where we lost vs a new Finnish team called Soltec on nuke which apparently is by far our worst map. I think we put up an alright effort vs roccat (14-16, 11-16) considering we only played together 6 days before the event, but still losing vs Soltec was really disappointing for us (not to take anything away from them, they played great vs roccat too).

Clearly it must be disappointing to start a new chapter like the result at the WCG qualifier. Was Soltec the better team or do you perhaps need more time?

Obviously Soltec was the better team in that match since they won (with a big margin) but at the same time we are very unprepared and unorganized at the moment so it's not the end of the world, I'd rather lose there and learn from our mistakes than go to a major event and drop out early there instead.

How do you plan to correct the errors of the qualifier?

We have talked about what went wrong a lot and we will do our best at fixing what we think we did wrong, what was wrong with our strats etc in general and most importantly, trying to get our teamplay and communication working, as I think that's the ground to build everything else on.

Where do you think you might be able to improve in areas that the old 4Kings.cs could not?

I don't really see any reason to compare us to the old 4Kings CS team (whichever you mean), we'll do our best and see where it gets us.

4 Kings is obviously more renowned in the UK than anywhere else, do you think you will be able to benefit from the UK fanbase?

Any existing fanbase is always welcome but I hope we can get more people outside of the UK borders to cheer for 4Kings too.

What are hopes and expectations of the future?

After about a month of solid practice I think we should be able to give roccat a run for their money as Finlands #1 team (so I'm guessing Kode5 qualifier?) and hopefully compete for top3 finishes in international events. We're a totally new team so it's going to take a while to get our teamplay and communication down but once we're there I know we can beat anyone.

What was the final decision that made you choose to represent the 4 Kings organisation compared to anyone else?

To be honest we didn't talk to a lot of different organisations, we had brief chats with a few but in the end it was easy to join a well respected team like 4Kings.

Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen (C)
Janne "Kuppi" Kuparinen
Joona "natu" Leppänen
Matti "SPIKE-ONE" Järvinen
Tomi "toomi" Lundahn