After the Arbalet Best of Four tournament a lengthy interview was conducted with the famous Virtus.Pro player, and now Arbalet tournament organiser, Alexey 'LeX' Kolesnikov. After splitting that into four parts (as well as a bonus fifth) SK Gaming can now present to you the first part of the series. The other parts will be released each monday in May.

The theme of part one centers around Virtus.Pro's struggles in trying to live up to their potential. The key moment will comes to mind is the WEG Masters tournament in 2006, an event plagued by its own problems and at which some of the others in attendance were impressed by the aims of the Russian players.

LeX has an interesting story to tell about that event and what went wrong for his team. Rule changes, time delays and NoA all combined to see Virtus.Pro eliminated from the event during the group stage.

The legendary Russian player has the scenario put to him, based off information gathered from an ex-team-mate, that part of the reason there have not been any great Russian teams with him in the lineup for the last few years is that he has become the 'Russian cogu'. That is to say that despite his skill level other players said they didn't want to play with him. Is there any truth to that and what is LeX's take on it?

Part 2 will be released on Monday the 17th of May.

Part 1: