I will be using this platform to daily (if possible) update you with whatever might be of interest: latest results, pictures, short interviews and movies. I will specifically cover the TrackMania Nations tournament, as I will be participating in it and hence can hopefully provide some in-depth updates. I am not sure, which hotel I will be staying at so far - apparently the 18Steps hotel offers free wireless LAN, whereas I have no information yet about the HolidayInn regarding that issue. Hopefully both do, otherwise I need to bring my laptop to the event and try to get access there.

The TrackMania Nations tournament consists of 24 players, starts off with 8 groups of 3 players each (best two advancing) and is followed by a single elimination playoff tree.

The groups are divided as follows:



The outcome of the entire tournament is barely predictable, but still we have some clear favourites, namely KarjeN and FrostBeule (both Swedish), and some who might become a threat for those two: PeZi (Austria), Carl (France) and Moriah (Portugal). The odds are pretty high that those five mentioned players will be forming the top5 of this tournament and honestly, I would also bet money on that =)

As far as I am concerned, my chances of positioning high in the tournament are not very probable. The five tracks have been out for two weeks, whereas I was busy studying at least one of those two, since I had to write six(!) exams in the prior week which did not leave any space for practicing basically. However, I would still have a very hard time beating the above mentioned players, even if I was as practiced as they are, simply because they possess exceptional a talent for this game. My personal goal is thus to reach the semifinals (5th-8th) and who knows, on a given day I might also be able to beat one of them :))



My journey starts tomorrow (Monday) at 14:00CET and I am going to meet my national team at the airport in Frankfurt to get our flight scheduled for 19.00CET. My total travel time is going to be sick ... about 30 hours accumulated, as we have booked a weird connection flight, starting at Frankfurt, to Incheon (South-Korea) and finally to Chengdu ... with a 7 hours stop in South Korea, not being able to leave the airport due to visa issues ... haha :)

Anyways, I will be updating this as soon as I have arrived at Chengdu and then I will keep you posted :)



Hey guys again ... so far we only have access to the internet in the hotel's lobby, that's why I have not been updating this blog yesterday evening when we arrived. All I can say so far is that we a) had one hell of a trip ... I'd rather pay 300€ on my own and get a direct flight than this mess and b) the hotel is awesome (just had some delicious breakfast) In about 40 minutes the players' tour is gonna start including a visit to the Panda City, we get to see some cuuuuutie Pandas ohmygawd =) =)

Following will be lunch with all the players, the Opening Ceremony, the Opening game in Warcraft III between our very own yAwS and Sky and finally the players' party in the evening. I will keep you updated ... see you later :)

14:30: Finally back from Panda city ... was fun in the beginning, but got boring the longer we stayed. Afterwards we had lunch at a place next to the hotel and frankly speaking, it was awful - we barely ate anything there, hoping that there will be some decent food at the player's party tonight. After lunch, we stopped by at a little store and bought some drinks for the upcoming days and I am telling you, it is so unbelievably cheap here :)

Just a few minutes ago I was told that I will be the one waving the flag at the Opening Ceremony later this day for Team Germany ... ouh, nice honour :) Make sure to watch the livestream and do not miss my great wavingskills! :P

For your entertainment, I uploaded a little movie from Panda's City - we went past a tiny lake and to our surprise saw roughly 100 fish swimming next to us and gathering on one place ... a must-watch ;)





Hello again - sorry for not having updated this blog for quite some time, but today was a really busy one. Good news though, I passed my groupstage as first and thus have the "easier" bracket tomorrow, avoiding to play Carl and Fruit and instead Munkeholm, HotSwat and PeZi. Definitely doable, but still I will not take this for granted. My mate BOmBe unfortunately could only place second and hence has to play the two major favourites KarjeN and FrostBeule. By the way - during the match Tamarillo vs. Moriah vs. FrostBeule there was a little argument between the last two mentioned. Since the winner of that group was to face KarjeN in the quarterfinals, they both tried to not win too many points in order to not get first. In the end, Moriah exaggerated by stopping at the finish line and letting the two other players pass. After the map, FrostBeule stood up, went to Moriah's place and they started argueing about that incident and the argument ended in Moriag receiving a warning by the admin. So if he did the action a second time, it would end up in a disqualification, but that did not happen.

I am sorry for not having uploaded any further movies or pictures, but I am pretty busy here. I will upload some tomorrow evening though, as the TMN tournament is finished by then and I will have some spare time for "coverage" :) Laters!



You will probably have read the news already or seen the results somewhere else - I "only" managed to place 5th-8th in the tournament. However, considering my preparation, I am very satisfied with this result ... it really could have been worse. The two Swedes took first and second, as expected, and hence have very high chances of winning the overall medal rankings this year, if one of their CS teams is taking home gold as well. Everyone has to admit, that both KarjeN and FrostBeule are playing on a whole other level at the moment and simply cannot be beaten right now by anyone else. The final was basically played as two 1on1s, as KarjeN and FrostBeule were about 50 points ahead of the other two players in the end ... so it was a fight for 1st and a fight for 3rd place. The Trackmania final took once again place very very late (19.30 I believe) and as Chinese people usually go home at 18.30, there was barely any crowd watching the finals, which was very disappointing and also left a bad image of Trackmania.

The entire German team did not perform too well yet, with a lot of players dropping out of groupstage, including mousesports in CS. FIFA is once again the only game we stand out in with three players in the top16 ... let's hope they bring home at least one medal for us :)

We have two days off now basically and hopefully will find some spare time to explore Chengdu City and to also do some (cheap) shopping.

Make sure to check out my gallery, I've uploaded some pictures, mainly of the Trackmania tournament though :)

---> gaLLos WCG Gallery