The reigning Major champions from Spirit won’t group up and bootcamp before the upcoming Major, Leonid “chopper” Vishnyakov revealed last week.

Spirit’s approach is unorthodox compared to the rest of the scene and has also become a talking point in the community, sparking criticism from some analysts and fans.

However, in an interview with BLAST, Spirit’s superstar Danil “donk” Kryshkovets defended the decision and fired back at the criticism with a sharp response.

– First, I think that it isn’t the business of the community at all. Experts and talking heads can say everything they want, but we don’t give a shit about them.

– It’s individual for every team. Some teams are better to bootcamp because they will focus better, but for us, we practice much better online from our homes compared to what we would in bootcamps. When you have all those people in one room it can be loud and your energy just goes down really quickly. During practice online, this isn’t an issue, you play more praccs, you’re doing more team stuff.

– How can we see a problem with this when we won a Major without a bootcamp? It’s the same for all of our trophies. It never was a problem and it’s still not one. I don’t think a team that’s been playing together as long as we have needs to bootcamp, we don’t need team building, we don’t need to get used to each other, we spend a lot of time together, we talk about CS a lot.

– Imagine we play a month of tournaments, all of us in a room for ten hours a day, and then we go and do a bootcamp as well straight after. It’s very hard emotionally, mentally, and I think it’s not something that you have to do. If we feel that we need to do it, then we’ll do it, but we don’t feel like that right now, donk said to BLAST.

Longer time to prepare

Spirit is directly qualified for Stage 3 at the BLAST.tv Austin Major, which means donk and company enter the tournament on June 12th, alongside the likes of Vitality, MOUZ and Liquid.

Whether the no-bootcamp approach will work once again remains to be seen, but as donk pointed out, it already proved successful.

The Austin Major officially starts tomorrow.

You can read the full interview with donk here.