DuRuS talks to Juvenile from Loaded before the start of their games

Juvenile, the only played returning from the summer events last year, with his new team, Loaded. He is a very well known face in the CoD4 scene, having travelled to play in Europe on 3 different occasions, namely with EG, Pure and now Loaded.

I spent some time chatting to him about their groups, as well as how he thought the team itself was compared to the rest of the competition.

Here is an audio version of the interview, with the written version of it directly below it.

I'm here with Juvenile at the Crossfire Intel Challenge 7. You've come a bit of a long to come to this event, but how are you finding it so far?

Juvenile, a regular face in the CoD4 LAN scene

It's pretty nice, a little bit of a walk from our hotel, but its ok. The flight wasn't too bad, 7 hours or so from Detroit. It's been nice so far, met a few of the teams and will hopefully start a few of our matches soon.

You said it was a long way to come, but do you feel ready and up for the games? Or is jet lag going to play into it?

I think we are good enough, I mean we slept on the plane, so as far as sleeping, we are all pretty fine. If we have to we can always go back to the hotel for a quick nap.

Let's start talking about your groups. You didn't get a seed, but how disappointed are you that you weren't allowed to take part in the seeding tournament?

We're not that sad really, it would of been nice to play, but we have 3 players with pretty much 200+ ping, and the time distance would have also been hard, as they would have class still, as they're West Coast. They told us that we were going to get a layer 2 seed but we ended up getting the last seed. But the groups we ended up with were fine.

You're in a group with Power, as well as a few others. People have Power down as one of the favourites for the tournament. How confident are you that you can maybe win it, or at least get through to the playoffs?

Definitely really confident, I would be extremely disappointed if we didn't really make it out of the groups. We are also really confident we will win the group overall. Power are a really good team but I think we can beat them.

Why's that?

Just because some of the Euro's [teams] over hype themselves a lot. Obviously they are really good, but they're giving us almost no credit, minus the odd person here and there.

What teams are you giving credit to, what teams are the ones to beat, the tournament favourites in your opinion?

Honestly most of the normal ones in the year, they're all pretty good. They won tournaments, fnatic, Reason as we were talking about are on and off, but if they have a good tournament they can easily win. dignitas is pretty good. I'm honestly looking forward to a few of the German teams maybe making an upset considering they haven't been so hot on LAN before.

Where do you think will be your weak point in the tournament? What are teams going to beat you on, like a certain map etc?

I am not sure if there are any maps that we need to avoid. Obviously Crossfire is a map we are not overly amazing at, but we have put a lot of practice into that map as we know it is a map that the Euros are going to try and pick so we have put a lot of practice into that. We're pretty good on all of them [maps], but it's just if teams play really weird we're not really able to adapt, which I suppose is our only weak point.

How much of a difference do you think this team is compared to the team that came over last summer with Pure. You're the only guy from the lineup that has come over from last time, but how much different do you think this team is?

The team last year wasn't a team, we were all a pug [mix]. 3 or 4 of those players just joined the team less than a month before the event, so we didn't really get to practice at all. We tried to strat in America but it didn't work, we were losing even to American teams, so we said just go to the event and we'll pug [mix] it, just run around. But this Loaded team, I snipe, I have always sniped. I was spec op'ing last summer. So they were no where near the same, and this team is 10x better than the Pure one were last time.

So are you hoping for better results then? What's your target for the tournament?

We want to win, top 3 would still be nice. Anything less would be disappointing.

Talk to me about "The Legends", the group of players that have signed up out of the ashes of Team EG and Pandemic. Are you disappointed they didn't follow you over?

I was hoping they would be able to make a team sooner, and get a sponsor, but there is only so much you can do in trying to get a sponsor. Supposedly they are talking to a few, so hopefully they can find one before the summer LANs come around and they can attend a few of those and it will give them enough time to get activated with the game, because as of right now, they are a little rusty.

Are you saying at the moment you are a lot better than them?

Yeah, maybe once they get some strats, get some nades, get playing again, they will get back to how they once were, and give us some more competition.

Thank you very much for the interview, anything you want to end with?

Thank you to Loaded and Brenden, Thermaltake and our sponsors.