UKTerrorist

4Kings at the CPL WC

The entire Four Kings CS team (minus our organiser Fraggle) attended the event, in case you don't know, we are Jonny 'TheGenius' Neffgen, Marc 'Liquid' Mangiacapra, Freek 'oppie' van Workum, Dan 'DanFrag' Lucking, Pieter 'Darth' Kwak and Doug 'Grim' Wright. We were accompanied by Glenn Nicholson and his girlfriend Sarah, who were our chaperones from TPF.

Arriving in Dallas...

We arrived at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Dallas really late Wednesday night, checked in, registered for the CPL and went straight to bed. We were all up early Thursday and were down in the tournament area about 10am, our first game wasn't until 5pm Friday so we had plenty of time to snoop around the event and meet everyone.

Where the problems lay..

I cannot shower enough praise upon the organisers of the event, as is habit, upon arrival we spent the majority of our time seeing where the problems lay so we could moan about them. We spotted that the HLTV screens were viewable from the tournament area and I think that was about it. Luckily the delay was so long on them it had no effect on the games at all, except as spectators, we could see when teams won rounds before they did on HLTV. The only other gripe we had was the inclusion of de_clan2_fire as a lower bracket map, as before the tournament, the preliminary maplist had not named this and being reluctant to play the new map anyway, we didn't even look around it before we arrived in Dallas.

The PC's

So onto the good stuff! The PC's were really good: 1.7MHz p4, 256Mb RAM, GF2 Ultra 64Mb, the whole shabang. Being a devoted AMD buyer I was pleasantly suprised at the performance of these machines (which may have had something to do with the setup) which outperformed any other PC I have ever seen by an absolute mile. Also as is a common problem with gaming tournaments, we expected some trouble with the mouse drivers, this was done very well, with each PC having the drivers for Microsoft, Logitech and Razer on the desktop. There were multiple referees behind people every game so there was never any chance of touching the hard disks with custom configs or the like.

The setup was easy, you would get on your PC's half an hour before the game (ALWAYS on time), uninstall the mouse drivers (and keyboard if needed) and reboot. In about 15 seconds (literally) you'd be back in Windows, install the drivers you needed, change any video card settings (all settings were allowed to be modified, e.g. I played with colour correction gamma 1.6) and get into CS. After a couple practices with the CPL GUI menu, anyone will know that its pretty easy to get the hang of, and setup didn't take more than a couple minutes. The advantage of the tournament being so prompt was that by the actual intended game start time, everyone was ready, only once did I see a game start notably after the proposed start.

Shopping? During the biggest CS event to date?

Thursday saw the start of the tournament, with the qualifying rounds being played, we didn't catch much of this having spent most of the day at a nearby mall doing some shopping but the teams that expected to qualify, did. There were no upsets we heard of, although a few close shaves.

Let the games begin...

Friday saw the start of the main bracket of the tournament with some really good games going on, especially DTP (#25) vs AEI (#40) with AEI winning the match in overtime 6-6;6-6;2-1;2-0. The big suprise of the bracket was SNT #55 knocking out the big American team PAG #10 6-6;6-6;2-1;2-0 in overtime. [Ed: PaG have since folded]

We played clan Hardtastic (#57) in this round and played quite well, letting only one round through as CT (the last round) and losing the first round of the T half so we could flex our ECOing muscles, final score 4K (#8) vs Hardtastic (#57) 11-1;2-3. They weren't as bad as the scoreline makes out and had very good aims, just lacking experience.

Now the real games started, with the main tournament upper and lower brackets starting up, there were some games that really stood out here. Clan RDW (#17) (who played great the first two days of the tournament then seemed to fall apart a bit) beating Green Berets (#16) 9-3;3-9;3-0;1-0. The eU - aT game was really good, with aT really holding together in the second half to scrape past eU 10-2;3-2 on de_cbble. However the best game of the round was clan PwA from Singapore, at a lowly seed #30, shaping up against the mighty danes, clan SoA (#3), the score for PwA as T was 6-6 which looked really promising for a slow map like de_cbble, however SoA pulled the win out with a 7-1 T half.

Our match for this round was against AEI (#40) who had beaten DTP (#25) in the first round, so we were a little wary of this game, however we played well and made a fairly easy win - 4K #8 vs AEI #40 10-2;3-2.

The next round (we are now at round 2 of the upper bracket) saw even better games, although smaller quantities of course. The main suprise was American clan RDW (#17) coming oh-so-close to beating the great NiP (#1) 6-6;7-4, I think this showed everyone at the place who were swearing NiP were untouchable that they could be beaten. Getting in the headlines for the wrong reasons again were poor old SoA (#3) who pulled a really hard draw against Infernum (#19), who were on superb form and won the game 7-5;5-7;3-0;1-0.

We faced American clan WEW #9 in this round on de_dust2, a good map for us and we made a really good T half losing only 2 rounds to the CTs. Final score 4K (#8) vs WEW (#9)10-2;3-5 and our first tough win at the tournament, we were really pleased so far, being on good form and not making any dumb mistakes.

Concentrating on the upper bracket, the next round (quarter-finals) on de_aztec saw NiP (#1) vs 4K (#8), mTw.GoL (#5) vs aT (#4), I (#19) vs SK (#6) and the only Americans left facing each other DoP (#7) vs X3 (#2). mTw.GoL (#5) vs aT (#4) resulted in the expected mTw.GoL win 9-3;4-0 and X3 beating DoP 11-1;2-0.

Again Infernum (#19) who were really proving to be the dark horses of the tournament, pulled out a win against the higher seed, beating SK (#6) 7-5;6-2.

Up against the mighty NiP

We weren't confident of beating NiP, but just hoped that we had a chance and if we could make a good start on de_aztec, we might be able to pull a result out. We started off great as T, winning the first round which was executed to near perfection. Whatever the first round was, the second round was that and more, with a great rush winning the round without injury in about 20 seconds flat. We were starting to relax a little and feel good until NiP | Christensen took his virtual steroids [Ed: time for virtual drug testing me thinks].

Due to a stupid mistake by myself, he managed to USP both van Workum and Lucking, then pick up an AK and take me out, Kwak and Mangiacapra had fragged the rest of NiP, however... he killed them too. NiP had started and they did not stop, no misses after that and the money was theirs, we cracked one round in the middle of the half but nothing more was coming our way. As T they started as strongly as they had finished CT, winning 3 rounds in a row, the fourth we won before their inevitable winning round. Hats off to them they were fantastic but very pleasant and sympathetic, score 4K vs NiP: 9-3;4-1 for the Swedes.

Down to the lower bracket

Down we went into the quarters of the lower bracket to play the map we didn't want to play, de_clan2_fire. We lost the coin toss and the Norwegians chose to go T first. So we started in some on-the-spot tactics which showed their inexperience. 4 rounds for us as CT, there wasn't much we could say or do to each other about it, it was everyone's fault we didn't practice it and we just had to try. After hanging on by the skin of our teeth as T, needing 8 of the 12 wins to draw level, we lost our 5th and the game 8-4;5-5. We were really annoyed about this game as we feel its one we would have cruised having practiced and at first my mind went to blaming the CPL for altering our seed at the last minute, thus changing our chance of playing this map from about 50-50 to 99-1. In fairness it was our own stupid fault and arrogance we didn't practice it and MA (#17) deserved to win.

The rest of the tournament? Well you'll find the story told better on any number of gaming sites out there with real writers, although I do have a response to the Europe and NiP vs USA and X3 question we have seen on forums, websites, e-mails, IRC chats and more over the past year or two.

X3 vs NiP

The games between these two teams were like nothing we have ever seen before, not just challengers to each other, but completely different styles having no idea about their opponents, it was a treat even for people like myself who have watched a million demos before just to be able to watch these guys. There is a hair's breadth between them, and one that hopefully will stay and switch hands in the years to come. It also shows there aren't just two clans in world of CS, someone else will come along no doubt, if these guys can do it, why can't the rest of us?

The USA and Europe were chalk and cheese in CS, but in ability the gaps were minimal, for a lot of the USA clans, switching players was the norm and this was a virgin CPL outing for some. I think the scene in Europe is more disciplined because of the disadvantage we have with language differences and connections from country to country. In the USA, a New Yorker can play in a clan from Alaska, ping allowing, thus players can be switched without the trouble we would see having a German player play for a Norwegian clan for example. Slowly and steadily the scenes are going to become more alike, and much closer in ability.

Here's to a great CPL and fibre optic connections for everyone!

Real thanks to all the CPL staff and players for a great weekend, especially: Glenn and Sarah from TPF for putting up with the kindergarden 4K team the whole time, Frank Nuccio and all his admins for being able to handle our UK keyboards, consistent whining and seating arrangements, [W.e.W.]Scissors for letting me meet the ultimate CLQ god, the dude in the red hat who wouldn't stop swearing in the BYOC on Sunday morning, our organiser Fraggle for being the daddy supporter through the competition and all our mates who stayed up to watch the games, SoA, X3, Infernum, GB, WeW, aT, PwA and eU for being the leetest people at the event and of course clan NiP for giving us a well-deserved spanking.

4K | Neffgen

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