Once one of the front-runners of the UK scene Michael “SPK” Man was a professional 1.6 Counter-Strike player. Now in his wise old age, he’s decided to finally make his debut at EPIC.LAN 43. With one loss, a draw and five wins, SPK and his team One Point Six have secured play offs.
Coming to LAN with very few expectations SPK and the One Point Six squad are excited to demonstrate their ability and see if they can give the youngsters a run for their money. Beginning their EPIC 43 campaign with a draw to 8Sins, a result that many people didn’t expect, they immediately demonstrated that they were a team to watch out for.
SPK sat down with Tommy Parker to give an interview to talk about his career and his journey here at EPIC 43. SPK began his professional career with a debut in 1.5, but began to play less and less as the game transitioned to CS:GO. His current level clearly shows he never truly hung up the mouse and keyboard, but after taking a step back from competition in Global Offensive’s infancy SPK returns to competition with a point to prove here at EPIC 43.
So to begin with, would you like to introduce yourself? Tell us a bit about yourself?
When you came to LAN with the team that you’ve got what kind of expectations did you have and did you expect the success that you’ve got at the moment?
You mentioned before that people don’t know who you are, to begin with do you feel like that’s helped you in certain ways? Do you feel like you’ve been underestimated?
Yeah probably, you know when we played 8Sins they probably had no idea you know? We were sat right next to them its a bit awkward when literally our guys sharing the same table. But yeah I think like they don’t really know who we are. They’re checking us out and they’re like ‘Oh my god these guys are like old school people.’ I think its kind of worked in our favour a little bit, but at the same time you know were just coming in with confidence and fun and experience because we’ve probably got like 100 years of experience like 100 years between us.
In regards to the UK scene as a whole, you may consider yourself an old guard of sorts, how much do you think its changed since when you were playing to now?
It’s crazy the growth, I think FACEIT’s helped to bring it along with UKIC and other communities and there’s a lot of activity going on. Back in my day you know when you were on Dignitas or Four Kings or whatever you just wouldn’t play any other UK teams, you wouldn’t go to a UK LAN, you wouldn’t even bother looking at it. But I feel like there’s a big community now there’s a lot of UK talent shining through, there’s Gizmy there’s Cypher there’s mezii there’s all these guys.
There’s way more opportunities compared to before and obviously there’s salaries now which was something that we never got. There’s even prize money, back in the day were were fighting for a grand or whatever you know what i mean? There’s way more stuff going on and the UK scene is always developing its never quite there, I don’t really know what that is. Its not quite like Ukraine or Russia where they’ve got 15/16 year olds with unbelievable skill but yeah its definitely grown a lot and from what i can see today everyone seems to know everyone, its a pretty big LAN.
So leading of from that because you mentioned Gizmy and mezii, has there been any players here, specifically of the newer generation, that’s particularly impressed you?
Honestly I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it. It would be good to play them and see what our skill level is like i guess as a bit of a benchmark. I think we do a lot of throwing so I think if we play our A game, how we do online and stuff and just use that experience of no LAN nerves or anything. We’ve got no expectations then we can do better. It would be good to play the top guys and see what they’re like and if we win I can scream.
Do you get like a sense of pride seeing the changes and the development of the UK scene?
100 percent man its been crazy honestly. This journey of CS has been pretty much most of my life, like I’m 32 and I started playing when i was like 12 or 13 so its been a good 19/20 years of playing CS. Obviously Valve isn’t great at helping that, I think that the UK opportunities have grown so much and its really good for young players to actually achieve their dreams and play. There’s VALORANT as well now which is i guess helping a bit in terms of organisations, but i think its really good to see how many people are here and how many people are actually competitive. How many people are breaching those semi-professional ELOs all that kind of good stuff, tier one / tier three CS particularly in the UK, but it would be good to see a UK CS team that’s tier one. Whether or not we are gonna get that I don’t know but hopefully some of these young talents that are in Viperio Academy that’s where someone said they were like 15/16 years old.
Just one more question, so you played against 8Sins and that went all the way. How did you feel going up against them and how do you feel they played?
Yeah I know mArcus knows some of them hes like an old school start of 1.6 guy so that’s a really long time ago, them guys [One Point Six] are actually all older by like 5/6 years they’re close to 40 mate so they’re really old. But yeah it was good actually to see because I didn’t know they were seeded 3rd to be honest. I spoke to Neil_M, I’m sure you guys know Neil_M and he was saying that they are one of the better teams going and we just gave all we could I think we lost like three 1v1 1v2 clutches so we really should have converted that game when we were 12-9 up, but hey its swings and roundabouts and we’ll probably play them again soon in the brackets.
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