CS Took Off

In this series of articles, Kanaliiga aims to highlight the teams that play in our leagues and their players. The goal is to highlight the point that gaming is everyone's privilege, not just teenagers. The player can be a policeman, a surgeon, a warehouseman or even a pilot. In this article, some background on the impressive Finnar team in our CS series

1. What company are you from and what do you do for a day job?

We work with Finland's flagship airline, Finnair. Finnair has a lot of different hobby clubs anyway, and about a year ago, due to strong demand, we decided to also establish an electronic sports club. As such, our club is not officially connected to an employer, but we work on this in our own free time. Many different games are played in our club, but the most active body has formed around CSGO at the moment. The members of our club are (with a couple of excellent exceptions) commercial pilots. The shift work rhythm of a commercial pilot sometimes causes challenges to get a gaming group together, but on the other hand, it enables games at slightly more special times of the day.

2. Are there many teams from the company participating in the Kanaliiga?

We are coming to Kanaliiga CS Season 5 with three teams, with a total of 21 players. We started with one team in Season 3 and have been able to grow the team for each season with one team so far. The purpose is of course to increase the number of players in the future as well. The most active core of our club is strongly built around CSGO, but the goal is to expand participation in other Kanaliiga tournaments as well, such as PUBG and LoL.

3. What kind of team do you have? Will we keep our nerve and follow the tactics?

Thanks to the pilot background of the members, our team is pretty much the same spirit and thus we get along excellently both on and off the server. Of course, our 21 players can accommodate a wide range of CS experience and expertise, from silver to global and from beta 5.0 to beginners. As a statistical curiosity, it can be mentioned that "swasi" has not yet had time to accumulate as many flight hours during eight years of flying as can be found in the CS account. The Kanaliga teams have tried to take this disadvantage of experience into account and also the fact that some can sit on their own server learning smoke lineups and tactics more than others. Matchmaking and Faceit are of course played with mixed groups, and it's good in a big club that you can almost always gather at least 5 friends for games, regardless of the time of day. Although there may have been legendary meltdowns and screaming storms in Discord, 99% of the time the players are fine, their armpits don't get wet, and the cool analytical work characteristic of the profession can also be seen on the server as deagle headshots and the disciplined and flawless execution of infinitely complex executes. For example, walking into the arms of the enemy with a nade in hand is completely unheard of in our gaming groups, or the rumor that "GR4NDSL4M" led the league in total mateflashes at some point is completely untrue. Our own players' heroic deeds and ace-clutches are rewarded at our club's sauna evenings or our LAN events, which are organized regularly throughout the year. Someone threatened to make a highlight reel of embarrassing situations, but apparently the company dried up when no embarrassing situation was found on the server for half a year.

4. Does Twitch streaming work in flight?

Nowadays, our airplanes have WiFi networks that allow you to access the internet, and during your free time as a passenger, it has been tested that streaming from Twitch works well in the cabin! So you won't miss that important Kanaliiga CS match even when you're flying.

5. How have the games gone and what is the goal for the next season?

In the summer of 2019, we started Kanaliiga CS Season 3 with one team of eight. At that time, we played together for the first time and the tactics had not yet been perfected. However, it has been a pleasure to notice that after getting more game hours with the same game friends below, both individual performances and playing together have improved a lot. As individual improvements, we can proudly mention that "Kaffe" is now able to hit the opponent in the groin area with 100% certainty, or for example "Griever" is already able to regularly shoot 4K in every game, although the performance has so far always been spread over several rounds. Despite these, we unfortunately have quite a few young hitters, so our game strategy is strongly focused on skillful tactical play. An example of our superior tactical intelligence is putting "HAL 9000" alone on Nuke's ramp with the Negev. One of our top goals for the future is to show ENCE and HAVU a model and finally get one round win in Dust2 with Finnair tactics: the whole team flying V from double doors to mid with pistils. This is how we put the anger at home for the evening.

6. Which company would you like to see participating in the competition?

Norwegian

7. Other greetings to the people of Kanaliiga

As Kanaliiga's growth in a short time has shown, there is indeed a demand for such a corporate e-sports league and it will only grow in the future. It has been very nice to notice that there are gamblers from all kinds of companies just for Counter-Strike. The goal of our club is to bring people together through playing, and Kanaliiga has been a platform and an essential part of our growth. In our opinion, the Kanaliiga's success factors have definitely been the organizing organization working with a big heart, the good team spirit of the players and (unfortunately rare for the Finnish scene) the absence of toxicity. Let's continue together in the same way in the future!

The electronic sports association Mile High Gamers Club (MHGC) consists of Finnish professional pilots. In accordance with the rules of the Kanaliiga, three teams have been formed from MHGC's membership, whose players work for the Finnair Group.

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