
Team Spirit mid-laner Mafeos “Kid Bomba” Hatzilakos, in a post-match interview during the MLBB Continental Championships Season 8, reflected on what drives him to continue his esports career and shared his thoughts on the mindset teams need to have to perform well in tournaments.
I’ve always known, right from the start, that one day I’d become a champion on the world stage. I wasn’t going to get into esports just to not win anything. So my goal is to be at least the best support player. At the very least. And as for the rest... I don’t know, I just want to keep winning more and going further. I’m only twenty-one—that’s very young. We’ve already won a tournament, and I really like this team; I really like my life right now, and I don’t want to change anything. I’ll just keep working and moving forward.
I don’t know—I get that feeling at every tournament. You asked that question as if it only happened at one tournament, as if we’d only performed well at one tournament. But no, that’s not how it works for me at all. Here’s how it works for me: I see what we’re doing in practice, and everything we do in practice… I’ve already mentioned this in many interviews—we’ve added a system to our gameplay. And I think it shows.
We play differently than we used to. And I see that if something goes wrong according to our system, there’s a Plan B; if Plan B doesn’t work out, we have Plan C; if Plan C doesn’t work out, we have Plan D. It starts with the draft and goes all the way to the macro phase, where the game lasts 20 or 25 minutes. We just played practice matches and learned all of this. We added a system that all Asian teams have had for a long time, and now it’s simply one of the best in the world. That’s it. Before that, the system wasn’t very good—maybe it didn’t even exist—at the M5 World Championship, the MLBB Southeast Asia Cup 2023, and in 2024. But now everything has simply gotten much better.
I believe that any tournament can be won, even by these teams that we beat in 10 minutes. They, too, need to play with the mindset that they can win the MCC. Why did they come here if they don’t plan on winning the tournament? I’ll never understand that—if someone is playing that way this season—and I’ll never be able to understand it. This mindset is very strange to me—the idea that you enter a tournament with no intention of winning it. To me, that’s just insane—like giving up on Barts.
Team Spirit defeated Omnix 2-0 on the third day of the MLBB Continental Championships Season 8 regular season. At the time of publication, the “Dragons” were tied for first place in the standings with Team Yandex, both with nine points.
Photo: Esports Foundation.