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After a disappointing exit at FACEIT Europe Minor qualifier, we sat down with LDLC’s David “devoduvek” Dobrosavljevic to talk about his career in esports.

When the French-Serbian player first picked up Counter-Strike: Global Offensive back in 2014, he quickly rose through the ranks within the French community. By the time he played in his first Gamers Assembly, all eyes were on him — he was a guy with 400 hours to his name and he was keeping up with the best players in the country. It was only natural that suspicion arose.

The cheating accusations followed him for the next few years, up until his big break when he was invited to join Team EnVyUs. After that, he joined Sean “seang@res” Gares at Misfits, where he competed in North America for nearly a year and even qualified for his first Major at ELEAGUE Boston.

Since then, the 23-year-old player returned to France together with his teammate François “AmaNEk” Delauney to compete under the LDLC banner. Although being eliminated from the FACEIT Europe Minor qualifier by Aleksi “allu” Jalli’s ENCE eSports was a tough pill to swallow.

devoduvek opened up about dealing with cheating accusations, handling the pressure, wanting to return to Europe, and learning from the mistakes.

Vie: How did you start playing the game?

devoduvek: I’ve always been passionate about CS when I was a kid. I played the game for the first time when I was about 8 years old in a local cybercafe in Serbia during my summer holidays and I’ve been playing it since. I just couldn’t regularly play it because of school and stuff like that but I’ve always had the mindset to become really good when I was playing.

That being said, when I started CSGO in November of 2014 after buying a PC that could run it, I was getting pretty good really fast and people started accusing me of cheating almost every game. This combined with my passion for the game made me believe I had the potential to make it to a pro level, especially that CSGO was really blowing up in popularity at that time.

Vie: Were the constant cheating accusations upsetting?

devoduvek: Actually yes, but in the beginning, I was having a lot of fun, so it didn’t bother me that much because it was getting me a lot of publicity. After a year, when I started playing more and more competitively, it was a bit sad seeing people not acknowledge my skill, but just simply say that I’m cheating, instead. It never demotivated me, honestly, I just kept playing my game and that’s it.

The only thing that changed is that I had a really “shaky” aim, similar to that of Kjaerbye. I had a lot of confidence in it, but I knew it made people doubt if I was legit when they saw me play. After some time, it just got to my head and I started forcing myself not to shake my aim that much. That lead me to change my way of playing and stuff like that. Now I’m trying not to care anymore. I think this is how I should have dealt with it from the beginning.

Vie: Looking back at someone like ropz, who nearly quit the game before his career even started because of all the cheating accusations. Was it like that for you as well?

devoduvek: I think after the ropz drama people really understood how terrible it is for an upcoming player to be called a cheater like that. It was even worse for him than it was for me because he was playing in FPL and some of the accusations where directly coming from pro players. Hats off to him for handling it as well as he did honestly, look at where he is now!