Artour "Arteezy" Babaev plays the carry role for Team Secret. He is formerly the carry player for Evil Geniuses, and is regarded as one of the best players in his role in the world. This is his second International, and his first with Team Secret.

How are you finding Seattle?

I was in Seattle, same place, last year. So I’m already familiar with the area, so that feels nice. It’s actually way better than last year — you felt like you’re foreign. But now it’s like you come here, you’re like "oh I’ve been here before." It’s really nice, it reminds me of Vancouver. A lot of the Western places remind me of Vancouver, because I was in LA before and I kind of felt at home.

Tell me a little bit about Vancouver. Is home-time really important now that you’re kind of jetsetting a little bit, and kind of going to all of these tournaments?

I think naturally you should follow some base, that you should get away from your team every now and then. I don’t know if this is like other teams but every team that I’ve been on, personally, if we stay together for too long we start to like find problems, like create a problem, find a problem. So yeah you need to separate yourself from the Dota world every now and then.

It’s about being able to synergize with your team and not put up with them, but to like get used to being around them. Is that something that happened with Secret?

Oh yeah, we have a problem like if we stay together too much, we start like getting angry at each other and like really mad, and the scrims stop getting productive and they just start being like s**tshows. Just generally after Starladder, we just stopped — we don’t spend that much time with each other, we spend enough time that’s necessary.

Is that just a matter of the raw talent of the team being able to make up for that; it sounds like if you guys were in a team house, you’d all be dead.

We’d just disband. Everyone’s so different on this team.

Right now, during the bootcamp days I guess you can call them, like problems are starting to arise. But like they’re not huge problems as like Romania, where we had some huge problems. Like we’ve already experienced this feeling before so we went over it, so we understand what’s happening right now.

We’re able to identify, you know, ‘maybe we shouldn’t scrim today, you know, maybe we should play some pubs, talk about the game, not actually play the game.’ And that’s probably more productive, for sure.

It sounds like it’s a balance issue right now, where you guys are like, ‘we’re on this really good roll, we’ve got a lot of pressure going on us going into this TI, it’s like let’s not put ourselves into a situation where it’s going to throw the entire thing off.’

Yeah it could be like that. I’m not totally sure why it’s like this, it’s just something that happens.

Do you have kind of like a support network outside when things kind of get a little bit, you know — family, friends?

Oh yeah, I have a lot of friends that I still talk to from high school. I have like a Facebook chat with them, that everybody’s in the group. And whenever I’m angry or something I just open up the chat, or maybe I don’t even talk that much and I start laughing. Because my friends are actually complete goons, they’re all like kids, basically. It’s always a good time with them.

Some people when they get into eSports or when they get into being a player, that whole other life kind of just fades away. Would you just go nuts if you didn’t have that?

I think I’d definitely feel a bit sad, once I like realize that I used to talk to these guys and we used to have so much fun, laughing, doing stupid stuff. But it’s definitely something you don’t really feel until it’s gone, because I appreciate a lot even though I don’t show it maybe to my friends, but it’s always nice to have something to support you.

If you don’t take the time that you need, do you burn out faster the next time?

With me, yeah I sort of need a mind clear. And then after I do that, then I’ll be probably fine for two to four weeks. It’s like random — sometimes I just get angry at the game. It depends on my pubs, I think. For me though, if I’m playing pubs and I’m against Techies every game, I’m going to burn out in five days, I’m going to get so f**king angry.

I was literally just going to bring up the Techies, actually. As soon as Techies happens, pros tweet about it, and it’s like ‘OK they’re in a down period right now, they played one too many Techies.’

Basically, my mood depends on how my pubs go nowadays. It’s depressing, however it’s how it is. Like if it’s in the morning, I wake up at 9 a.m., I want to go play some pubs and just chill out. If I get Techies in my first game, I’m probably going to be angry for the rest of the day, it makes me super angry.

I imagine if Techies gets removed, it’ll be this new golden age.

I actually want, after TI, either IceFrog to change the hero or remove him from ranked.

What do you kind of think of the people who are like, ‘OK we want like a mode like 'single ban' where everyone can ban one hero?’

I like the idea. That’d be pretty cool, I think. I would like that.

What about something like if instead of All Pick something like Captain’s Mode or Captain’s Draft became the default mode in ranked?

I think Captain’s Draft has potential, I don’t think Captain’s Mode has potential, because people usually when they play pubs they just press Find Queue. For me, I just press find match, then I find the match, and then I tab in, I just pick a hero, press mid — that’s all I do. But like CM you just finished playing scrims, you don’t want to like, pick, and if you don’t pick maybe your stupid teammates can do something stupid. So Captain’s Draft seems pretty cool.

Do you find that you’re — not only Secret, but you yourself — are under a huge amount of pressure? You guys are obviously the favorite coming into this tournament; how do you kind of reconcile that as a person and as someone who’s relatively young?

I guess, when I was always growing up, I always tried to do the best I can at something. So when I was in high school for example, I would always be the best at studying for tests. For grade 11, I was studying a lot of biology and I would try to beat these kids in my class who would always beat me so I tried my hardest to beat them. So I would always be on sort of like the spotlight already.

So the transition from real life to Dota, and being in the spotlight all the time, it kind of happened naturally. I still get surprised by how many people actually...sometimes I read Reddit, and there was some statistic that Secret was going to win TI like 40 percent, so I’m like ‘alright, what the hell?’. I actually don’t feel it, I don’t think about that kind of stuff until I actually read it. I just think it’s really cool a lot of people are interested in us.

You guys have a fanbase. You guys are completely driven by the star power of your individual players, but now, is it weird Team Secret fans now instead of just Arteezy fans?

I like to think that the majority of Team Secret fans are Euros, and most Euros don’t like me very much, but for the ones that do it feels a bit odd because I’m from North America. At the same time I welcome them — I hope they like the BabyRage and such memes but, yeah.

We’ve seen a ton of pictures of your lavish lifestyle in Turkey, in Istanbul. Maybe tell me a little bit about how that kind of relationship has kind of affected the team’s ability to get stuff done.

We only went to Turkey once, for the StarLadder bootcamp. I actually can’t remember most of the time because I was pretty sick, I was sick near the end of the boot camp.

Everyone else was just going to meetings, fan meetings. I was just sitting in the hotel room, watching my show, I think I was watching Grey’s Anatomy back then. Even though I seem kind of clowny and stuff on stream, I’m pretty antisocial in general — like all Dota players I think, everyone’s sort of antisocial. So yeah, I prefer my alone time a lot.

Do you think that Secret as a majority are like that? It seems like everyone’s their own lone wolf.

I think we are like that. That’s why I think the root of our problems is when five introverts come together, and after a certain time we just get annoyed with each other naturally.

Do you have anything you want to say before we sign off?

Yeah, shout out to the fans, keeping it real. I’m surprised there’s a 40 per cent chance for Secret to win TI but you know how it is.

Matt Demers is a Supervising Editor at theScore eSports, and is doing interviews from The International in Seattle. You can follow him on Twitter.