I actually arrived last night but today was the first day of competitions and work for me. I got at the event at about 8:30 which was well in time for the first match at 14:00 CET.
Before noon we set up the 2 cs servers and the hltv needed to cover the games for all of you. After some succesfull network tests all we had to do was wait for the CS players.
The 4K players were here again early in the morning and starting playng games immediately, they actually played last night as well. and they continued playing today untill the party started so in these two days that i have been here i have seen them playing for at least 10 hours already while they only had one match. These guys are real pro it seems and play A LOT.
Back to cs, at about 1200 still no Swedes had arrived, after some phonecalls we found out that all of them were on their way somehow and SK was being held up because of a photoshoot. nip were the first to arrive, but seeing as they didnt have to play they left quickly to find some food. Some time after fnatic and sk also arrived and started to set up their stuff. fnatic had no real problems while setting up their pcs but allen and goodfella did have a minor problem with the game being started in a window but not in windowed mode, anyway thanks to the EPS admin sleeper we managed to fix this and all was set for a smooth event.
Both sk and fnatic needed to go up the stage for an interview with giga2. Each team pushed forward their dedicated speaker, and pushed can be taken very literally. For sk its goodfella doing all the talking while with fnatic its either carn, archi or dsn.
The game between the two was a great spectacle with a lot of enegery from both sides and in the end SK came out on top surprising many people with their solid play.
fnatic were really down after this loss and needed some time to pick themselves up and go up against nip.
Robban and zet both had a problem with their steam not wanting to log in. They kept giving in their details and said they didnt have internet and something was wrong and we needed to help them. So after 5 minutes of trying stuff i figured i woud try entering my details and guess what it worked. So the problem they had was pretty simple, the keyboard was still in the german language and thus the keys for the password didn mathc.
Anyway nip went on to play fnatic and won. During the entire match zet was the one taking heatons place as team motivators and yelled "fett nice" lmost everyround and with every kill. NiP looked prety solid after this match and seemed to be the favourite heading into the match against sk.
SK chose not to play dust2 vs NiP while NiP decided not to play inferno. The cointoss brought forward the map called de train. This is a great map and awlwasys brings some great action. ( btw: nuke wasnt ever picked as the map they did not want to play but it never won the cointoss, poor nuke )
NiP took the best start but sk countered with some great ECO tactics and set the tone for a very even and exciting half. The t side from sk had a great wallbang from allen, who once again showed that he has wallhack like vision on LAN. according to fisker (dead): wallhackor pa lan, or something like that.
nip tried everything in the second half but didnt look like they could counter sks good play. In the end SK earned the direct invitation into the final 24 of the Extreme Masters by ESL.
fnatic and nip will now have to play in one of the 4 other swedish qualifiers and hope they can win one of those.
While writing this blog i saw the new intel commercial featuring vilden and i must say it looks great. the first commercial was cool but was a bit far fetched and didnt show gaming. this one is totally focused around gaming and explains it a bt as well. eventhough vilden plays 1vs1 against another player it still shows more aspects of gaming. i hope you can all see the commercial soon and enjoyed it.