Throughout 2018, Kai "KSP" Collins has been on the rise. The former Koord Narwhals member has taken the year by the horns and moved up from his original European Open Division team and has played alongside team’s like Bazooka Puppiez and Young and Beautiful. KSP also assisted Team United Kingdom in their Cinderella run through the 2018 Overwatch World Cup and now has trumped Group A going undefeated with Samsun Morning Stars.

I caught up with the KSP to talk about Samsung Morning Star’s last match of the regular season against Winstrike Team and suffice to say he was extremely confident going into the match. He explained that both Samsung and Winstrike have two styles they play, but he and Samsung are going to stick to their guns and play their tried and true style. He did reveal that it is fairly difficult to practice for such a team because no one plays their style. Winstrike Team’s Mei variation of the tank-centric metagame has been gaining in popularity, but it was not enough to defeat and Samsung Morning Stars took a convincing 3-1 victory to close out their season.

KSP also spoke with Esports Heaven about how he views the professional practice environment, his time so far on Samsung Morning Stars and his thoughts on the upcoming Overwatch League season.

I love the team; everyone is great including all the staff that works with Samsung. Walking into an established organization didn’t really change my gameplay, but it’s nice to have facilities that Samsung Morning Stars provides in Italy, but it can be hard working away from home.

I didn’t see much in preparation for the event due to other reasons but the event was amazing. It showed how it really is to be in front of so many people in the arena and the people watching at home. The UK boys are always confident, it showed behind the scenes as well as on the stage. One of the big reasons that we did so well was because we put the hard work in as well as having fun with it.

I would have to say remove or hard nerf Brigitte due to the fact that she is a low skill high reward hero that I don’t think anyone likes playing against.

I think role queue is a good idea but I don’t think that it will fix the overall state of ranked play. There will still be people that decide to ruin other peoples games for no reason and they don’t get punished hard enough for it. I think Blizzard needs to make serious changes to ranked as a whole.

I think pro-pugs are a good idea. It gives actual good practice outside scrims for the pros since ranked play is in a really bad state right now. But there needs to be a system that players can go through to get into pro pugs and prove themselves against the pros. Kind of like Rank-S or FPL in Counter-Strike.

I think Guangzhou Charge will finish top 8 at the end of stage 1. I also believe that Kyb is going to pop off and is definitely a player to look out for in the Overwatch League.

I’m not worried about coming up against any team right now. [My] team works hard and has the potential to beat any team in Overwatch Contenders.

Joseph “Volamel” Franco has followed esports since the MLGs of 2006. He started out primarily following Starcraft 2, Halo 3, and Super Smash Bros. Melee. He has transitioned from viewer to journalist and writes freelance primarily about Overwatch and League of Legends. If you would like to know more or follow his thoughts on esports you can follow him at @Volamel .