With the success of the Splyce organization over the last couple of days in both Call of Duty and League of Legends, Splyce’s Counter-Strike team looks to be the next to take that leap. Slingshot’s Blake Bottrill caught up with David “DAVEY” Stafford at Northern Arena on Friday to talk about their new roster and where they’re headed.

Blake Bottrill: The new Splyce roster is a one of a kind mix of guys. How did that come together? Who started the wheels turning that brought all the new guys on to the roster?

David “DAVEY” Stafford: It was both me and arya and the Splyce management. We just had the freedom to pick who we wanted for the most part. We said who we wanted and they went out and got them. That is how it got started.

BB: You have four different first languages on the team. Do you find that communication is an issue?

DS: English communication isn’t so much a problem. Actually being able to speak English isn’t a problem. We still have communication problems within the team, basic communication problems that all Counter-Strike teams have. It doesn’t really have anything to do with English; it’s just right now we really do struggle with communication.

BB: You have been playing a lot with a stand-in recently due to visa issues for one player or another. Machinegun couldn’t get his Canadian visa. What is the biggest difference playing with a stand-in versus playing with the full five guys?

DS: A big thing is we can’t really practice anything. That is the big thing: We play with almost no practice now. Even though we are scrimming and we’re playing, we can’t really do anything in depth. We can’t go into things we would want to do because we don’t have our fifth there. The other thing is, when you are missing a player like Machinegun, you are missing a lot of firepower. You’re missing a lot of fragging power, which this roster was built around having the fragging power of me, CRUC1AL and Machinegun. When you are missing one of those players, that is a key part of the roster. It’s the same thing with SK right now missing fer, right? When fer is not there, SK drops off hard because they need that extra player because of the role he plays for the team.

BB: How much practice have you actually had with the full five man roster then?

DS: The full five man roster? Only a couple of hours of in-the-server practice. We haven’t even played that many scrims because he has been in Asia the whole time. We haven’t really had any actual in-game time aside from going over some of our defaults and basic strategies.

BB: You guys are up against Winterfox next, they haven’t looked super impressive since coming over from Australia.

DS: Yeah neither have we!

BB: Are you comfortable or confident in that matchup at all?

DS: We are comfortable. We are just sort of playing at this point. It is no offense to our stand-in but we have literally zero practice with him coming into this because reD couldn’t come to this event. We have absolutely zero practice, we have a basic idea of what we want to do but it really hurts us to not have our full five man roster here. That’s nothing against buZZa for standing in. Huge thanks to him for coming and standing in. It does help out a lot, otherwise we might not have been able to come to this event. Going up against Winterfox, they’re a solid team. They have been playing together, they’ve been practicing. We are confident in everyone we go up against that we have the ability to win. It’s just putting the pieces together and getting the wheels turning to actually make that happen is what we’re struggling with.

BB: You didn’t have to deal with all the production issues yesterday because you just had your media day. They were almost six hours behind.

DS: I know. I heard.

BB: Is that worst you’ve ever seen at a LAN?

DS: No. It’s not the worst. ClutchCon was the worst. We had like a 14-hour delay on the first match. They had set everything up and they hadn’t tested the Internet yet so it was like, “OK, plug it in, hope it works!” It didn’t. It didn’t work. That was definitely the worst, I’ve gone to a few others that are pretty bad. This one had delays yesterday, but so far today it’s been decent. I had some FPS problems on my computer but that happens at a lot of LANs, actually.

BB: Aside from production, how is the setup?

DS: I think it’s cool. I think they did a good job with the setup. It’s interesting. I don’t like that the whole time we are playing we are sitting next to Hearthstone casters, but what are you gonna do.

Cover photo courtesy of HLTV.org