Keaton "Chakki" Gil has been playing Hearthstone since the very beginning. Originally known for his aggressive playstyle, the American has since become comfortable with every playstyle and every deck, establishing himself as one of the best players in the region. A former king of silver and current DreamHack Austin champion, Chakki has represented major organizations such as Dignitas and currently Luminosity Gaming, playing instrumental part in LG's recent team league successes.
Upon his return from the CN vs. NA Championship and between Trinity Series playdays, Radoslav "Nydra" Kolev grabs Chakki for a quick, five-question interview.
It's all very serious right until the memes.
You were in China for a week for the CN vs. NA Championship. What did you take away from the hosts in terms of Hearthstone knowledge?
As far as decks, the Chinese were really in love in with non-Questing Rogue and Dragon Priest while NA favored Renolock and a bit more Jade Druid. We might have slightly underestimated or overestimated some of those decks, but at the end of the day I don't think it was our undoing. It was pretty funny that all five Chinese players ended up copying our Questing Rogue list for the last day. As far as the actual event, it had some really awesome production and we were very well taken care of, so that was great.
"We [at LG] are still trying to prove ourselves as newcomers."
You and your LG team-mates are taking part in the ESL Trinity Series and you’re doing more than fine. What has been the major driving force behind LG’s success?
Well it's sort of short term success at the moment, so we're still trying hard to prove ourselves as newcomers. I guess our success is just we're all really strong players that communicate well and get along well.
We went down 5-3 in our first series but I don't think we ever really had negative thoughts and instead just focused on playing out the remainder of the series. It feels good to know we can trust each other to make the right calls on hard turns and keep the communication serious while still having a good time.
Staying on Trinity Series topic, help us figure something out. There are multiple theories why teams such as Alliance and Virtus.pro have been struggling, despite having a lot of individual achievements on their shelves. Looking from the position of ranking leaders, what is holding them back?
The simplest explanation is probably lack of preparation and not using communication very well. Some teams have talked themselves into playing bad decks and some teams have talked themselves into making bad plays. Ultimately I can't know how much time each team is investing into the tournament, but you can sort of tell when a team is losing and starts saying things like "why'd we submit this deck again?" that some things could have been improved. And of course, they could have always gotten unlucky.
Recently, I had a debate about competitive formats, where they mentioned the set-up of the HCT Prelims—a swiss stage into a “meaningless” single elimination—is a huge letdown and a very bad way to do it. Would you agree?
I think it's a slight improvement for the most part. Last year qualifying varied from having to go 4-0 to going 9-1 if you lost round 1 in the double elimination bracket. We'll have to see how smoothly prelims function with swiss now, but effectively you just have to 6-1 now or 5-2 and get quite lucky. Having a clearer picture of what's required to qualify helps in my opinion.
The cut to top 8 single elimination is quite sad, however. China I believe did double elimination for their top 8 cut and it's sad to see the West going in the opposite direction.
NA has been struggling to compete with Europe and even China in 2016. A lot of that is, of course, due to the lack of major LANs in the region, but things are picking up this year. Where would you rate NA at the moment and where do you think it will be by the end of the year?
"NA definitely falls short of EU."
North America's biggest issue is and has always been infrastructure. It's easy to talk about how NA isn't winning EU events but then gloss over how we had maybe seven representatives in a 200-man Dreamhack Winter field. North America is struggling to have a pool of players that travel to every event and are serious contenders to take titles, so teams don't pay to send them to EU for events, so NA has less streamers, and the problem kind of exacerbates itself.
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It'd be really interesting if someone did analysis on how many LAN titles NA would be expected to have based on how much % of attendance we actually make up at each event, because I would wager it's not too bad. It looks like with new DreamHacks, NA will have even more LANs this year which should hopefully help more up and coming North American players get noticed, sponsored, and just invest more into the game. It's really hard for these guys to go all-in on just making preliminaries and hoping to go 6-1 and garner some attention from teams, and obviously they aren't going to out-of-pocket a trip to Sweden to play in DreamHacks over there.
With those things considered, I guess you can still rate us as the poorest region in terms of overall player skill. It's really hard to compare to China since they're segregated from the West for the most part, but NA definitely falls short of EU. Our preliminaries consistently need less points to qualify for, we have a much smaller pool of actual talent, and we have less tournaments. I guess the bright spot is I consider the actual top of the pool very good. Hopefully we can continue to improve in coming years.
Bonus sixth question: If you could get a balanced Shaman at the expense of giving up memeing, would you make the deal?
Yeah I'd give up memeing to make Hearthstone good again in general.
