ESFI World

Over a week ago a handful of non-Koreans travelled to South Korea to enter the qualification tournament for the GSL Code A competition. On the other hand, some of them did not need to qualify and were selected by GOMtv to receive and auto-berth into the official competition, thus receiving a seed.

The four seeded players were announced as Andrew 'mOOnGLaDe' Pender, Jos 'ret' de Kroon, Chris 'HuK' Loranger and Hayder 'HayprO' Hussein. Out of the four, Pender is the only player living in the training house provided by GOMtv specifically for non-Korean competitors - the other three train in the oGs house in Incheon.

"The Gom house is a great place, very nice house with a lot of room, and beds," said the FXOpen eSports representative. Unfortunately for the Australian, the house is still lacking computers for the inhabitants to practice on. "The gaming room is a bit bare at the moment," he said. "We're still waiting for computers; but we have laptops and PC cafes are very cheap."

Whilst the majority of people would assume that the lack of computers would be detrimental to the players, Pender admits that it is "a bit disappointing but it's not a huge issue" for him. He stresses that GOMtv have been great to the people in the house and reveals that he is "very grateful that [Gretech] let me stay in the house."

Currently there is no news with regards to the arrival of the computers. Pender is not aware of any schedule and is still waiting to hear more information from Gretech, the parent company of GOMtv. "It would be great to have PC's but net cafes aren't too bad," he said.

"Generally we spend 8-10 hours a day practicing," said Pender. "We all go down together and practice together and ladder etc. Our local cafe has a coffee machine so we just make coffee for each other and practice for hours."

Having been in South Korea for almost two weeks Pender admits that his game is "definitely slowly improving" and says that there is still a lot more to come. "When I find out my first opponent in GSL I will focus more on the match up and improve greatly for it."