Shortly after losing their star player Dong "viOLet" Hwan Kim Empire signed Brat_OK to their roster in an attempt to fill the void that the Korean Zerg left behind.

In losing viOLet Empire lost one of their strongest, if not the strongest, player on their roster, a void which is going to be incredibly hard to fill for the Russian based organization. After a lengthy search for a suitable Zerg replacement they eventually had to 'settle' for a Terran, in the form of Brat_OK, who will pose another great addition to their already Terran-riddled roster.

In order to do so Brat_OK will leave team FXO, that is the European division, in order to make the change to Empire. The Russian Terran player had been with that team for since late 2010, attending amongst others IPL, NASL, DH and HSC events, but obviously their cooperation will now come to an end. Although he comes from a good team the move to Empire and it's incredibly strong Terran roster including Happy, Kas and Beastyqt should help Brat_OK improve immensely, and with the financial backing of Empire perhaps Brat_OK will be able to showcase that in one of the many tournaments to come alongside the organization.


Although the Terrans on team Empire are more than scary their Protoss and Zerg players are virtually non-existent. This seems to be a weak point for them in team-leagues, where the lack of a diverse roster will hurt Empire more than anything most likely.

Pavel "Brat_OK" Kuznetsov had the following to say on his move to Empire:

Change of team is always a hard decision. However, it was necessary. I am grateful to FXO for support and I wish them all the best. Unfortunately, I was not able to show results everyone expected from me. Now the time to change came. I join Empire to become better and stronger. Empire is not only high level, but a friendly team. Now we will conquer the world together!

Alexander "StrangeR" Solomonov, HR manager and head StarCraft coordinator of Team Empire, added:

I am sure that Pavel will make our team stronger even so he is the 4th terran in Empire's lineup. This transfer has been planned one year ago, but, unfortunately, was called off at the last moment. I am happy this time everything went smoothly and professional.

The fact that Brat_OK and Kas are in the same team gives us a chance to make training process more efficient. But we do not want to run ahead of ourselves. Our main goal is to help Pavel to come back into his perfect shape and to set up stable gameplay level.

In my opinion, Brat_OK is one of the strongest CIS players and I am happy that he is now in one of the strongest European teams.
If we are talking about Zergs... well... We'll see!