We were able to understand despite the sometimes broken English of the letter and corrected the mistakes. Here is the first letter we received.

"My dear Lawrence (codename Malystryx),

I hope you are fine and still writing your WarCraft 3 columns. I also hope that you've improved your gaming micro by playing DotA with your friends.

This week, there were some interesting goings on in Russia.

mouz.Happy will not attend ESWC 2008 Grand Finals in San Jose

Dmitriy 'Happy' Kostin, as proplay.ru reports, will miss ESWC 2008 due to reasons not connected with lack of money or studies. Dmitry did not give a significant reason.

Dmitry won the Russian ESWC preliminaries. In the absence of Gravitas Gaming players (ESWC overlaps NGL One finals), Happy eliminated DeadMan, Quai and SDMK on his way to the first place.

Right now, there are rumors going around Russia that Nikita 'Nicker59' Andrey Pomadov (that earned fourth place at the preliminaries) could go instead of Happy.

The undead player SDMK will also miss ESWC 2008 in San Jose for personal reasons.

Ivan "SouL" Demidov, an oldschool WarCraft 3 progamer succeeds in professional poker

My friend Lawrence, you might remember this gamer - he was in the legendary Russian team (orky) and he also was in SK-Gaming.

SouL was a brilliant WarCraft 3 player and now he uses his skills and strategic experience in poker.

Ivan took the second chipcount place in one of the WSOP qualification tourneys and qualified for the Final Event which will be played in Las Vegas, USA in November.

The buy-in for the Final event is $10,000, but TOP9 of WSOP tourneys (just like Ivan) get the place for free.

The Final Event is the most prestigious professional poker tournament ever.

The prize distribution for the WSOP Final is as follows:

1. $ 9,119,517 and the world's best poker player title.
2. $ 5,790,024
3. $ 4,503,352
4. $ 3,763,515
5. $ 3,088,012
6. $ 2,412,510
7. $ 1,769,174
8. $ 1,286,672
9. $ 900,670

Poker news by proplay.ru.

LyrA.WC3 team comes back after being parted by the Fair T6 sponsorship offer

Several months ago, the WarCraft 3 squad of Russian multigaming team LyrA Stars joined a sponsored organization named Fair T6.

Now they have come back. LyrA Stars regains its WarCraft 3 roster with some additions:

Kasatkin 'Alex' Alexey
Sergey 'Gold' Semilyak
Artyom 'InteR' Mayor
Gusakov 'pApArOaCh' Boris
Nikita 'Nicker59' Andrey Pomadov
Alexey 'phOb' Guckov (inactive)
parasite (inactive)

LyrA.Inter (picture) has just won a slot in the WCG Russia 2008 Finals by beating everyone in his home town, Novosibirsk.

The GamePlayTV League seedings are done

Mr. Phillips, you must've known about GamePlayTV - the first televised and broadcasted game league in Eastern Europe.

The registration period has finished and the officials made their seedings. Two of the best teams in Russia atm, Virtus.Pro and tp.uSports ProPlay.ru got into an easy group, while other top teams will face each other early in the group stage: A-Gaming.ua vs Rush3D in Group G, forZe vs A-Gaming.ru in Group F, Spb.Islanders vs PinCho in Group E and EYESports vs GoodManagement in Group B.

In WarCraft 3, the groups are equal - four Gravitas players (HoT, Rob, XyLigan and TitaN) were seeded into different groups.

Two players (or teams) advance out of each group. Other games' group seedings can be viewed here.

WCG 2006 champion Alan "Alan" Enileev is nowhere near retirement

I think you remember that we reported about the future retirement of the best Russian racer and WCG 2006 champion Alan.

Now, Alan announced that he is nowhere near retirement and that the source (cyberfight.ru) journalist had lied about his inactivity back then. He joined Russian multigaming team RoX Gaming and became a referee for the GPL league. Alan won't participate in the league itself because it uses Most: Wanted - an old game version which is not played on WCG.

This is how it went this week in Russia, Lawrence. Good luck to you, may your columns be as successful as they are now.

17th of July, 2008,
Cordially yours,
Serge"