Dosia on how he got into CS: “I started playing it in 1998—it was version 0.6 or 0.7, something like that.”

I actually started out playing Half-Life. There was an entire city league in Ufa with three divisions—A, B, and C. And each division had 64 players. ...> In Half-Life, I was in Division C—that is, the very *** [worst] one. I was probably about nine years old at the time. After that, literally about half a year later, CS came out. <...> In 1998, I started playing it—it was version 0.6 or 0.7, something like that. Basically, I’ve been playing CS for almost 30 years now.

I remember how we’d rent some minivan and just drive off to Orenburg, Izhevsk, and Samara, where the qualifiers were held. For some reason, Bashkiria wasn’t given any slots for tournaments at all. ...> For some reason, everyone just brushed us off, even though we performed pretty well. We just didn’t have anyone to organize things. But I’ve probably attended over a hundred of those tournaments. I mean, we were traveling somewhere almost every month to play. Of course, the prize pools there were only 10,000–20,000 rubles, but still.

We took third place in the 2007 Russian Championship, put on a strong showing, and three of our players were invited to Moscow to play for the CSKA team—they were putting together their CS roster at the time. The conditions there, of course, were... It’s worth mentioning that Dober, Vixen, and fox were the first to go there—I wasn’t picked for that roster. But after about 3–4 months, Vixen couldn’t take it anymore and went back to Ufa, saying: “I can’t handle this kind of *** [crap].” And that’s when they called me. <...> We had one tiny little room, 15 square meters—there was a mattress on the floor, a space heater, and nothing else, *** [damn], no. We took turns sleeping. We probably lived like that for 7–8 months.