One of the best teams in the world, Evil Geniuses is coming into the Digital Youth Award Finals as the heavy favorite to win. Before heading to Singapore, we managed to sit down with Josh “bkid” Choi who has been with the team since their early beta days of We Heart Pigs.
Thanks for doing this interview with us. First off, could you please introduce yourself to our readers?
Hello, I’m Josh also known as bkid from Team Evil Geniuses. I’m the person who thinks up the bans and picks for the team in matches and inside the game I’m the carry ganker along with the other guys like Chu being carry when he’s not supporting me 
, Dodo support ganker and Fuji being ganker/carry/support, etc.
How did you get introduced to Heroes of Newerth and how did you end up joining your current team?
A while ago I went to a DXD LAN event in SoCal and saw people playing Heroes of Newerth there. It looked really interesting so I went ahead and tried it out. Also helped that a lot of my friends were already playing. I’ve been playing it ever since. For how I joined up with these guys, when I started playing HoN in beta I played with some friends I knew from some DotA inhouse leagues. One day we just decided to make a team called We Heart Pigs and now with a little bit of time and roster changes it became Evil Geniuses.
A few months ago Loaded announced they would be closing down and moving to Evil Geniuses. What was the team’s reaction to this announcement?
We were sitting in vent and Brandon, the owner of Loaded, came up to us and told us that we were going to EG. I was kind of surprised that he told us they were only planning to take the HoN team, but we were also really excited as EG is a well known sponsor. Before we went, though, we questioned ourselves a ton if we actually needed the sponsor. After a lot of meetings and back and forth with the owner we decided to sign the contract and now we are happily in EG.
Evil Geniuses is definitely a well established organization. How are you liking this transition?
Yeah we’re definitely liking it. They are really good to us and they gave us what they promised and stuff. I just wish they started pumping out HoN articles like they used to at Loaded though.
With the team, you guys had to make quite a few transitions in the past, like from WHP to Check-Six, and then Loaded to Evil Geniuses. How did you guys feel about having to go through these changes from organization to organization?
I guess when we went from WHP to Check-Six we were kind of excited since we were the first ones to really get picked up by a sponsor in the HoN scene. They didn’t really have anything to offer us though because at that time HoN was still barely in beta but we joined anyways just because lol. For the other changes, it’s not really a big deal since Loaded was really just the same team coming over from Check-Six and then we moved to EG. So while we did have to move around a bit with organizations we still stayed the same.
Moving over to more recent events, last month you had the opportunity to travel to China to do a promotional event for the Digital Youth Awards as part of your prize for winning the CEVO tournament. What did you think of the experience?
It was a great trip. The DYA China event was almost like a tour with tour guides and on top of that they provided everything for us. Also I think it was a great cultural experience that I will never forget. It was just an all around great experience.
Tell me about it, what did you do during your time in China? Did you get to see anything cool? Walk me through a day.
First day Dodo and I arrived in China at like 8 pm, went to the hotel rooms and went to bed. We woke up the next day, ate breakfast and went straight to the Expo until about 4 or 5 PM. Basically we ate, went to the World Expo and then later just hung out with the people at night. Going to the Expo was pretty cool. There were so many people, it was just so crazy. We also went to this karaoke and then played poker. Not too much happened since we were only there for three days.
At the World Expo we went to a bunch of pavilions, there were so many of them. As for the games, we played 3 on 3 HoN against the other teams that qualified from China and Europe. They were pretty fun, we ended up winning both. Met Laura from S2 Games and Tom from DYA which was nice.
I heard a funny story about Dodo saving your passport in an airport. What happened?
Uh he didn’t save my passport. I left my passport on the sink to test Dodo to see if he would remind me and he did, so he passed the test.
Now, in about a week you’ll be competing at the Digital Youth Awards finals in Singapore at GameFEST. Joining you will be top teams like KDe, now known as OK, and TSoG, and underdogs like ICE and PMS Girls. How do you feel going into this event?
First of all, very excited to see PMS Girls in person! I feel really confident about this tournament since right now we are solidly the best team. I also hope to have a great time with all the players that are coming! They are all great teams, even Team ICE. They improved a lot and it will be pretty tough, but we will come out on TOP! I’m also very excited to see how the Asian teams will play since we don’t know too much about them besides what we saw in the 3 on 3′s in China.
How have you guys been preparing for the event so far?
We haven’t been preparing that much since we are so busy these days. We are going to practice more this weekend though. Nothing special, just playing high tier inhouses with good players.
Are there any teams that you feel will be a threat? If so which ones and why?
I think OK is going to be our biggest threat because they’re really a well established team. They’ve been dominating the European competitive scene with FnaticMSI and they also have some great players. I also haven’t really seen the Asians play as a team yet, so we don’t know what to expect with them.
We asked Drayich this same question, but since we haven’t seen much from the Asian teams how well do you think they will do? What do you think they will bring to the event?
I kind of saw them play a 3 on 3 when we were in China. From what I saw, they had some good team work and a lot of movements. I think they will be a huge threat and we aren’t planning to underestimate them.
It’s no doubt that you guys are probably the best team in the world right now, and even during the beta days you were always consistently one of the best. Why do you think this is the case? Also, why do you think you’ve managed to be so consistent while other teams like SK Gaming (formerly Team Five, and your rivals in the past) fell behind?
It’s probably because I am on the team… Hate to say this with my own mouth, but I am really good! We are probably consistent because we are usually very active, so we’re always on top of our game individually, and have good team work since we’ve been playing together for awhile.
All that is great, but it’s still something to be said that you guys don’t have that much LAN experience as the scene is still relatively young. The only real LAN you guys attended as a team for Heroes of Newerth was the launch party quite a while ago. While a majority of the other teams might be in the same boat as you in this regard, do you think this inexperience will come into play in Singapore?
I don’t really think this will be too much of a problem for us in Singapore. Also, I believe we have some practice time so that should get us prepared for the whole LAN environment. OK though has some advantage because they played at Dreamhack and did really well in that environment. Still don’t think the whole LAN thing should be too much trouble.
Alright, thanks for doing this interview with us! Any last words or shout outs?
Thanks to Evil Geniuses for supporting us and to their sponsors Intel, Steel Series, Kingston, Thermaltake, Intel Extreme Board, MSI, and Bigfoot. Also thanks to det who is interviewing me instead of managing me
Pictures from Heroes of Newerth
