Long time Finnish star, Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen has been to virtually every major CS event since exploding on to the international stage since the collapse of Destination Skyline and the wings/srs/hoorai/69N/roccat lineage of teams rising to fill the void. His team, Roccat, is coming off a razor thin loss to fnatic in the NGL-ONE final. There they came from the lower bracket and forced a second best of three with the number one team in the world, only to lose the last map of three 16-14.

We had a chance to catch up with him to ask a five questions about the upcoming tournaments at CeBIT and his team's chances this weekend.

With such a close loss in the NGL Finals do you see this tournament as your chance at redemption? What did you learn from the NGL-One finals?

Well first of all honestly I think we played the best CS we've ever played, we changed our playing style a lot after the bad run in tournaments we had last fall/early winter and it seems like what we're doing now is working much better than what we did before and our teamplay/communication is also much better now so I don't mind losing the finals THAT much, because I know if we can keep that up for the rest of the year we'll get our share of titles.

Is fnatic as strong as they were in 2007? Where do you currently see roccat ranking?

I guess there are as many opinions as there are people, but since there is no way to know the right answer I think it's pointless to speculate it, maybe they're in a slump, maybe playing good, or maybe the stars were aligned wrong who knows. My own opinion is that other teams are catching up to them and it will get harder and harder for them to stay as the best team in the world as the year progresses. About us -- I think it's still too early to say as we've only attended one tournament this year with just four teams, we'll have a much better idea after ESL EM Finals and SEC this week.

You're competing in both SEC and the EM Finals. Is this good or bad for your team? Will the teams attending only one of these events be at an advantage or disadvantage?

The ideal solution would be to play just one tournament at a time, especially since the ESL EM rules allow you to decide two maps you don't have to play in the whole tournament if you don't want to, so if you're only participating in that you could spend all the time practicing just 2 or 3 maps (depending if you're planning on playing cbble), instead of 4. I think the biggest problem is the fact that ESL is using CRT monitors and SEC is using LCD's -- I don't mind playing on LCD's anymore because most of the tournaments use them, but I absolutely hate switching between them for one or two matches and then going back, which is what we had to do at DreamHack.

Roccat stumbled early on in the online portion of the Extreme Masters but recovered later. What do you credit the turn around to, weaker opponents or your team's stronger play? Did these results expose some of your teams weaknesses?

We've always been known as a team that doesn't practice a lot and just runs around like chickens with their heads cut off when we do so to speak, so I think after the horrible showing at DreamHack we finally realized it's time to work if we want to stand on the podium at all this year and we've managed to create a lot of new strategies, change our playing style and practice much more seriously in 2008, which I believe is the reason we've been playing better.

What do you think of the SEC seedings with MYM second and emL and mTw at 5th and 6th place? Should events use their own tournaments for seeding or a team's overall form when seeding their event?

Quite frankly I think the seedings are horrible, no matter how you look at them. First of all I don't think we have enough results for them to seed us 3rd, unless you base a lot of it on the NGL Finals we just played. Then again, it's clear that MYM is seeded based on the events earlier in 2007 (shg, SEC, ESL EM, ESWC), and fnatic based on just about every event except WCG (whose event this is).

On the other hand, emuLate won WCG, mTw placed 2nd, and A-gaming 3rd, yet all three of them still have absolutely horrible seeds -- These seeds really make no sense whatsoever to me. They should have either seeded all teams based on their results in WCG tournaments (SEC, WCG) or based in all RECENT tournaments (in which case MYM should have much lower seed). At the end of the day, you still have to beat all teams if you want to win so I don't really mind, but it would be good if someone figured out a way for all events to make good seedings.