innocent on return to LAN at 31: “I’m feeling a little bit grandpa at the moment”

Team Venom’s Paweł “innocent” Mocek has been around the block. Now 31 years old, the in-game leader of Polish CS lineup Team Venom has previously attended Majors as far back as DreamHack Winter 2014, a true veteran of the scene. He, alongside his young team of dark horses, have arrived in Malta for the Thunderpick World Championship 2025, hoping to deliver some shocks on the server.

We got the opportunity to speak to innocent, and ask him a few questions about the event. Can they upset the odds and serve up some upsets at the Thunderpick World Championship 2025? He certainly seems to think so.

innocent on playing his first big LAN in years, and being ‘grandpa’ on Venom

Daniel Morris: I think a lot of people will look at the team list at the Thunderpick World Championship and think ‘Who are Venom?’ So, why don’t you talk me through a little bit of the play style that we can expect to see from you guys.

Paweł “innocent” Mocek: I do hope it will be a lot of team playstyle with some sort of individual plays, because that’s how I see the game most of the time. Good teamplay combined with the individual performances. I try to build the team around it and when it works, it works really good. But lately, when we come to these tournaments, we didn’t play good at all. I think right now the biggest problem was individual level, I would say. So I just hope we can bounce back from this and show the actual level we had qualifying for this event instead of the one we had after the qualification, because it was fairly… In my eyes, it was a disaster for the team, especially on the individual level. So I hope to see it improving here and just having, you know, competitive games.

Daniel: So I hope to see it improving here and just having, you know, competitive games. You attended majors back in 2014, 2015, and 2018, I believe. How does it feel to still be attending LAN events in 2025?

innocent: I think it’s great. Especially that it’s a new role for quite some time now and like having the youngsters again in my team all the time, you know, feeling a little bit grandpa at the moment, but I’m getting there. Yeah, but it’s great. I mean, it shows that there is still something in me.

Daniel: You’re carrying the torch for Polish CS.

innocent: I mean, it was always really tough to build a competitive, stable, competitive team because I’ve been in good Polish teams that were really good for a moment and then it’s just a slide down and it happens with any Polish team, basically. So, to build the consistency is the greatest challenge in our scene I think. So it’s great to qualify for those events because I’ve qualified for, like, a bunch of them with different lineups and all the other Polish rosters did it too. But it’s basically for the sake of one event and then things go bad. But as I said, we just need consistency to actually get here more often and actually show up something on these events because usually it works the standard way for the Polish team. I wish we had it more often and with some sort, at least some sort of competition when we get there.

Daniel: From the outside, it is fair to say that Venom are underdogs coming into this event. But what are your expectations from the inside of the team?

innocent: Honestly, even though like, like our past events in the last weeks or so were like pretty terrible, I’ve always felt it’s much better to play against the structured teams and the teams that actually play on the good level because we practise a lot against them and stuff. So it’s like completely different story than playing practise against or like officials online with the lower opposition. There is a bit too much randomness in those games and compared to the CS state in general right now, which is not good. And yeah, I think we all should feel better to compete against the better teams and at the tournament with the high stakes obviously. So I think it’s gonna be good for us… I hope it’s gonna be good for us. Yeah, as every event expectations are as high as possible. But also like, realistically speaking, you know, we are like heavy, heavy underdog right now. We have probably like, I don’t know right now, top-seven, top-eight teams in the group and Imperial as well. So yeah, it’s gonna be obviously the toughest opposition we’ve had this year so far. But sometimes it’s better to have this opposition instead of the lower ones.

Daniel: It’s a test of your level isn’t it?

innocent: It’s nice we have young players, we have one player that it’s, I think his first event that it’s prize pool is bigger than, I don’t know, $30,000 or something and we have people around 20ish years old. So I think it’s great and like we hope we can just improve day by day.

Daniel: You obviously mentioned your individual level before and that needing to sort of improve. Was there anything in particular that you guys prepared coming into this event?

innocent: I think we just, you know, try to play a lot individually and focus a lot on the individual level. Playing more Deathmatch than usual and you know, I don’t know, we spoke about it to just think of you, what you’re doing wrong, not much of a team talk, etc. Obviously we had some and we will have some after the media day. But yeah, just for everyone to just look in the mirror and say “What could I be doing better right now?” to actually start winning games for my team because sometimes the score doesn’t really say what’s happening in the game because you can lose, I don’t know, 13:7 but if you won this one single round when you win the duel that you should have won, the game goes a completely different way. So yeah, I think and I’m pretty sure that the individual level is the main reason we are in the shape as we are right now. So we will get rid of that then we can see on which level we are actually as a team with strategies and stuff. So I hope we get there and then we can actually work on the mistakes we do team wise instead of just blaming the… beasue our analysis says “Okay, if I killed this guy, there is a round,” and it’s true. But… you have to win these duels. Because at the end of the day it’s a game like who kills who faster in the game. So like you, you could be the perfect team but if you don’t finish it with the kills then you will lose the game anyway. I just hope that everyone will actually chime in with some extra kills every game and our riflers will deliver and yeah, we will see what will happen in the game.

Daniel: You guys face Aurora up first. They face a rough exit from their last event. Has there been anything you’ve noticed about their playstyle that you think you can exploit?

innocent: I think their playstyle is actually the most annoying I would say from all of the teams because they are really great tactical-wise. They have always perfect nades and perfect timings, blah blah. But they also shoot very hard. But some somehow they are not, they are not title contenders let’s say. Yeah, because they are always getting somewhere but they don’t win events. But I think like their, their preparation, their base of the team and their firepower is really insane. I even said it before the event that this team would probably be the one that will make us the most problems, I would say, so it’s tough to get matched with them in the first game. But yeah, I mean if you want to get far, we have to be competitive against anyone. So it’s okay. But at the end of the day it will just you know come up though as we said before, who shoots faster because we also have nice strategies but we need to frag.

Daniel: Final question for you. Recently we’ve seen you guys play a few smaller LANs in Poland and the U.S. Also, you play a ton of online CS as well. What’s the biggest difference between the two and what do you like more about being here on LAN?

innocent: The previous tournaments were kind of like 2015 vibes, I would say. And this is a tournament you want to be part of. Like every single time you get a chance, you go there. And the other events was just chasing ranking because when we agreed to go to them, we were obviously in the position where we could fight for the major. But with losing the first one, the Birch Cup, the chances were like non-existent, I would say. And then Fragadelphia was just, you know, it was the same kind of event and for us it was just to grind some ranking, but it wasn’t possible to get anywhere to the goal we had. So yeah, like, I think the biggest difference is that here everything is perfect. And the other events were just, yeah, you felt like you play online tournaments, but on the spot with worse monitors, 240 hertz, worse PCs, worse chairs, and everything worse basically than you have at home. So yeah, those tournaments were just a quick grab for the points, which was a failure for us. And this one is a real competition. So yeah, I’m looking forward to get back to it again.

You can watch innocent in Aurora vs. Venom at the Thunderpick World Championship 2025 on the Thunderpick Twitch channel.