A professional Call of Duty League player with the Minnesota Røkkr, Bance has been known as one of the best European slayers in competitive Call of Duty since 2014. His aggressiveness with the SMG has been something teams have had a hard time dealing with for many years.

Starting his competing career, he played for several teams, including Splyce and Excel Esports, both of which were based in the UK. He moved to the CDL in 2019, where he signed with the Toronto Ultra and played for them until 2022. He then made the switch to the Røkkr for the MW2 season, joining fellow UK teammates, Afro and Cammy.

We spoke with Bance to talk about the Minnesota Home Series, Asilo Control strategy, and how he got into competitive Call of Duty.

The Minnesota Røkkr has put on Home Series throughout the year (MW2). What's that been like? 

The home series has been great. I feel like Minnesota is doing a good job of pushing the boundaries of what's possible. The first one sold around 4 to 500 tickets. This one I think was around 700, maybe more. They're absolutely killing it when it comes to these live events and I hope a lot of other teams look at this and think, you know what, we want to do this and make it so we're playing more in front of a crowd. There's nothing better than playing in front of hundreds of people chanting. I love what Røkkr is doing. They (fans) motivate you to do even better.

Give us a little bit about that background and that upbringing. How did you get into Call of Duty and then how you made your way into the league?

I used to play split screen with all my brother's friends and then one of my brother's friends was on MW2, trying to play something called game battles. We used to play 2V2 game battles. We went 6-0 and I used to think, yo, I'm so good. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, we were not so good. It went from there really. My first (competitive) was on Black Ops 2. It was like ranked play and I had "free agent" in my in my clan tag and the team hit me up. It went from there really of just having "free agent" in my clan tag, which not many people do anymore, but that was how we used to find some teams back in the day.

What has to go into getting over that hump to get to a Grand Finals?

For us, at the moment, it's having a consistent playstyle. That's always an issue when it comes to teams, not just us. It's finding your identity when it comes to how you want to play. People just think you're spawning, run around, get kills and that's it really. But it's meshing your playstyles, meshing the pace of the team, what sort of pace you want to play at, because it doesn't really matter what sort of pace you play at, as long as you you're all on the same page, you're all bought in and consistently do it as a team. There are certain teams that work in certain ways, for example, OpTic. They have Shotzz and Huke. When they're at their best, it's them running around, being annoying, sitting in corners, getting a kill, running to a different corner, being insanely fast and just unpredictable. Then you have LA Thieves who are very team orientated, the way they set up their breaks, the way they chall together and it's all just about finding your identity as a team. We've kind of struggled with that. The last few months of how we want to play, how we want to approach stuff, it's just trying to get on the same page. Then going through a roster change. You lose a guy like Attach, he's had a phenomenal career. He's one of the better players in the CDL ever to do it. What it's been like trying to make that switch going from him to Fame, who's looked really good in his rookie year. I think he's a very solid player. But you talk about a little bit of that team chemistry and trying to figure out how you all work together and how you guys want to pace it out