Esports Heaven was able to sit down and have a chat with Melchior "Seleri" Hillenkamp from Viking.gg on their recent games at ESL ONE LA EU/CIS League. Seleri talks about his gaming history and what made him get into professional Dota 2, their win against OG, their coach ImmortalFaith and more. Hey Seleri. How are you doing? Hello, I am doing good thank you! Tell us something about yourself Seleri. I started playing 'games' when I was 4, Chess being my first game. I played Chess for a long time and was quite good at it but I did not have the motivation to put in more study hours to improve a lot. Like a lot of people, I played Pokemon. I started playing the card game myself and managed to get quite good at that. I was able to go to the World Championships in Hawaii which was a great experience. I found Dota by accident when a friend introduced me to it. I never saw a game like that before and just tried it for fun. After watching some big Dota tournaments and TI in 2013, I realized I want to play in a competitive environment and a lot of things happened during this time but it ended up somewhat working out so far. How did the current iteration of Viking.gg come to fruition? I had a break of a few months before last summer and eventually started grinding again at end of July. I was first approached by Immortalfaith for a different Vikin.gg line-up, however, in the end I was absent during a qualifier that they won and thus I was not in that roster. Fortunately, Aramis approached me to make a team with him and Shad and we ended up playing for a bit with a different roster. In an open qualifier for the Major/Minor we ended up playing vs the old Vikin.gg line-up and managed to defeat them. Post that, the old line-up had a lot of trouble and at one point we got approached if we wanted to try out for the organization with our roster. We had a few small shakeups in our roster but in the end, we ended up with Tobi and Boom joining us. You’ve the most experience in terms of competitive play as compared to your teammates, most of whom are first timers such as Shad, Tobi and Aramis. How is it leading the team of newcomers against some of the top teams in the world with all of the accumulated experience in your arsenal over the years? I might have the most experience playing 'competitively' but by no means am I leading the team. It's a team effort as well as our coach who helps us a lot in this aspect by being in charge of all the practice sessions, and helping us prepare against all of our opponents. I wouldn't take any credit away from anyone and I would say in-game we all try our best to do our 20% for the team. Speaking of which, how do you help them prep mentally and strategically in this kind of a situation? How does your coach, ImmortalFaith, come into play in this aspect? We are lucky to have a great coach that prepares us for every opponent and goes through every replay with us. He helps all of us individually and as a team and it's a great help since after a practice game we don't have to find what we need to look at or work on as he has already watched the game and we can immediately go into details on the game. I’d like to ask you about your most recent games in the ESL ONE LA EU/CIS League. Viking pulled out an upset against OG -- two-time TI champions -- after a difficult first game where OG were seen diving into the fountain and virtually annihilating your team in the process. How did the team recoup themselves after that loss? We were excited to play OG but we also felt very confident that we could beat them. In game 1, we felt confident but some errors in the game made it extremely difficult for us to play and we realized after the loss that we can just focus on the second game and play our own way. The rest of the series, we felt quite confident as the games were going the way we wanted them to go. The atmosphere was definitely a bit more tense and you could feel a bit more pressure than normal but that is to be expected. In the end I think we all enjoyed playing against such a good opponent. The Alchemist pick in the next two games turned out to be OG’s undoing. Shad was brilliant on that hero and the team played well around that pick. How and why did you opt to choose that hero? All drafting credit goes to our coach, but it just seemed to fit the game. We had last pick in both of those games and it just ended up being good games for the hero in our opinion. Even though we didn't practice it a lot we just went for it and we played well around Shad who played great! Moving on, the series against Virtus Pro was complete opposite where you lost in straight games. What happened? Do you think you got out-drafted or out-played? In the first game, we were in a good spot but we ended up making too many misplays. We are still a new team and can be inconsistent at times so we all just move on. In the second game it was maybe a bit more as to why we lost.  I made some huge errors on Chen that lead to us losing the early game way too hard. Either way, it would have been a difficult game but this error made the game get over extremely fast. Virtus Pro played well! You’re placed fourth in Group A tied with two other teams at the moment with three series to go. Seleri, how confident are you of advancing to the play-offs as bottom four teams are eliminated, especially when you’re yet to face Nigma? We are not worried about advancing or what might happen in our future series. We try to focus on one game at a time and give it our all. Of coruse, we want to advance but all we can do is focus on our next series. In terms of playing against Nigma, just like for every other opponent we will prepare for them and give it our best. We are not afraid of going up against anyone. How well is Boom filling in for Tanner after the latter’s departure to NiP? Boom is doing great! We all enjoy working with each other and so far the results show it. You’ve quite the diversified roster in terms of nationalities. Does that have any issues when it comes to communication in-game? Most of us have only played on international rosters in the past so we are used to communicating in English. In Dota it feels like Europe is like one big country for team building so we will also include Israel for Aramis ;) Alright Seleri, that’s it for now. Anything you’d like to say before we wrap this up? Thanks to Vikin.gg for helping us chase our dreams and improve, our coach Immortalfaith for helping us day in day out, and Shad, Boom, Tobi and Aramis for playing with me! Be sure to follow Seleri on Twitter.

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