Gaara: "I feel like I'm alone at Tempo Storm"

Petar "Gaara" Stevanovic from Tempo Storm shares 15 minutes of his time to talk his emotional attachment to DreamHack, Tempo Storm's current situation and his trip to China.

For Gaara, DreamHack Bucharest is a special event. One year ago, the German became the first ever DreamHack champion for Hearthstone. Seven months later, he made it to another grand finals in Sala Polivalenta, this time losing to Thijs "ThijsNL" Molendijk in one of the closest series of the tournament.

Gaara is also one of Tempo Storm's most decorated players but the team has been shrinking players-wise for some time now. Having very few team-mates left, Gaara says he struggles finding practice partners.





“

”

Reynad owns the team so he's too busy that he barely has time to practice Hearthstone, so it's just two players - me and Hyped. And Hyped is from America so we have completely different time zones and sleeping schedules and I never actually practice with him. I feel like alone and at the same time more and more players are becoming good at the game so you have to practice more and having a team becomes more and more important. So I feel that affects me a little bit.



The conversation switches to Gaara's recent trip to China where he and his Tempo Storm team-mates competed in the NEL team league. His impression of the local players there? Practice machines, dedicated on learning everything about the game, in sharp contrast to westerners' mentality.





“

”

I feel like the Chinese players are super tryharding. They have so many people scouting everywhere, all tournaments. And the western players are more laid back, they don't care so much. Yes, we do preparations, but we also stream and are more casual. But when you talk to a Chinese player, you will see how they're all about the game and don't care about the rest so much.



Watch the full interview below and follow our DreamHack Bucharest coverage here.

Other interviews:

ThijsNL: "The change that affected my results the most was the Conquest format"