Tomorrow Immunity will fly out to Beijing, China to compete in the MSI Beat It Finals against some of the best teams in the world.

The MSI Beat It finals on this weekend (4th-5th) will feature a cash pool of $25,000 USD and bonus top of the range MSI gaming laptops for the champions. Immunity however face some stiff competition by the names of fnatic, EG, and Tyloo to name a few, so how have they been preparing and what are their thoughts on the event?

I took the opportunity to catch up with Miles "rizE" O'Connor who was bootcamping at team mate gazR's house to share his expectations of the tournament ahead.

At fnatic.play, you'll be faced with some world class teams such as fnatic, tyloo, and WemadeFox. What's your expectation of the event and how have you been preparing for it?

I expect the event to be ran very well in terms of admin/pc side of things as all comps like this in the past have all ran very well. It's always good to play an event with that type of professionalism because it does make you more keen to play and be able to focus just on the CS side of things. Preparation wise we have been playing as much as we can online and trying out new things strategy wise but it's also hard to practice vs Australian teams when we are preparing for a different game overseas. I myself flew down to gazr's house a week ago so we could develop a bit more team bonding between us and really get some solid stuff down in strats / everything else.

At one of the last international events Immunity attended being IEM Taipei, you guys were a shoe in for the finals against WemadeFOX but got counter-strated by the local teams on the 2nd day. How will you prepare for similar situations coming into fnatic.play and WCG?

Well that competition we made a big mistake by underestimating some teams and it taught us a lesson. We've learned now that we are not to underestimate any team at all no matter how random they seem. This time around we will not be letting our guard down vs any opponent and we feel confident that we have enough strats this time to change our play if needed. This team has played 2 comps and won 2 comps and we have about 20x the strats as the last iM team that went. So hopefully this time we can play to our full potential.

The chance for Australian teams to compete at an international level rare and far between, in your opinion how will you stack up against some of the top tier teams there? Will we see iM cause upsets?

It is rare which is why we really need to grab the chances we have with both hands and make the most of it. Australian gamers are good and we CAN match it with some of the best teams in the world. I really believe that. It's just a matter of playing our best when it matters in those pressure situations, and not succumbing to the people we are playing and just trying to play our own game. Realistically in theory we can beat anyone I think if we all play our best CS and luck goes our way, there'd be no point in going if I didn't think my team or I could ever beat these teams, I would've quit CS a long time ago if I thought that. We're aiming for a top 4 placing but we won't be disappointed if we don't reach that goal - we know we don't have the preparation we want for Beijing but we will for WCG.

Being a long standing member of the CS community, you've seen the community evolve through the ages. There were periods where one team dominated the entire scene, and other times where competition was more evenly spread. Given your double OT against KBS at WCG.au Finals, how do you think they, or any other top team would compete in the international arena if given the chance?

Well I think too many people give up here and don't reach their full potential which is sad. I am good friends with KBS and learned most of my CS from Snoopy and Destroyer from ages back. I think teams like KBS, Archaic and v300 could probably do the same things we could overseas, the difference is I think we have a little more overseas experience now, with the exception of players like Kram and c0ke etc. I just don't think they're keen enough to play and get to that level again, hopefully I'm wrong and they keen up again because having those 4-5 teams all playing against each other will raise the level of CS in Australia and we'll have a lot more internationally recognised teams.

From the list of teams at fnatic.play, who do you look forward to playing the most and why?

I really want to play fnatic and EG the most. fnatic for obvious reasons as I personally think they're the best team in the world and who wouldn't want to see how they stack up against the best of the best. EG because in my view what I've found from international CS is that we play similar to the Americans - aggressive, back ourselves with aim and are loud / big on motivation. So I think that matchup would be really exciting to watch and hopefully we can show them what the Aussie's can do.

There were lots of doubts when Immunity first put together this lineup before ECN, but with 2 national titles under your belt you've silenced the critiques - if you could give one piece of advice to help teams out there, what would it be?

Well I just treated CS like I did soccer pretty much. I watched fzer0 go overseas and the first game I ever saw was 3D vs fzer0 on cbble and that made me so keen to be the best I just wanted it that badly that I made it happen. Anyone can be good at CS I think you just have to be dedicated and want to win. You gotta treat CS like a sport in my opinion if you really want to do well. The thing about Australian teams is that they usually have 2 or 3 people that feel this way about CS then the others just want to play for fun. If you want to be good you need to play every day and constantly improve your own game. I used to just vs bots and do first to 1,000 over and over until my hand got sore, Trong (Snoopy) can tell you this is true because he used to do it as well, so my advice is to get your team mates on the same level in terms of what you want to do in CS and what you want to achieve, then just play a lot.

I wish you and the team good luck in Beijing, are there any final words and shoutouts?

Thanks George, yeah shoutouts to all our sponsors Intel, Geil, BenQ, SteelSeries, AussieHQ, to Tony (Sent1nel) and Lloyd (Swordfish) for all the work they do for us behind the scenes, and thanks to anyone who supports us, we'll do our best to put Aus CS on the map!