Counter Strike Shakedown #1

FEATURE -- Forrest "var1ables" Campbell releases #1 of his Counter Strike 1.6 Shakedown.  This series will look at happenings in eSports and his opinion on what's going on.

Nothing in this feature is the opinion of Insider eSports.  It’s just my no-name journalist opinion.

If It’s Too Good to be True….

It probably is. It looks like ESWC can’t pay again, it looks like the G7 told us.....oh wait. So much for that boycott. Great job sticking to your guns, G7. Well at least we know what you are going to do with the money you just won ......oh wait .

Now too not sound too salty; I'll say this, I was fooled too. With the announcement of their bank backed prize purse and their list of sponsors, including car company Peugeot and one of the biggest mousepad makers QPad, I thought they’d actually pay out. However, it looks like DIP communications struck again, 0 and 2 for their successful event organizing.

Hopefully we’ll learn from this and not go to any of their events again.... until next year when we forget about this again. Let’s hope against hope that they can actually do what they said and pay out their prize money, but crooks always say they got the money before disappearing into the night.  They say they are going to pay this year’s winners in the next month, so hopefully that’s true.

To make matters worse we, Americans, didn’t even fair that well, with our flagship team EG being knocked out early and complexity leaving the tournament only a round later, with an embarrassing 2-0 loss to SK-Gaming. At least SK-Gaming made it to the finals, giving us some solace that we lost to the second best team in the tournament.... for the umpteenth time in a row.

Makers Met

MYM was disbanded. Surprising? Not really. After going home group stage in almost every tournament they’ve been in since DreamHack Winter, and the constant roster moves don’t exactly look good for the organization as a whole.

It’s probably obvious to everyone involved that they made moves that didn’t even make sense - like dropping moddii for FYRR73. To make matters worse, they lost their ingame leader in jumpy to retirement only to pick up yet another fragger in khrystal. And they later reacquired Moddii; not a lot of sense in their moves from the outside looking in.

It comes back to the basics for any team, don’t make too many moves, and don’t make moves that don’t make sense. Roster changes should produce results, if they don’t, what was the point?

Good News on the Horizon

Now that I'm done pouring salt into an old wound, I might as well move on. Arbalet Cup Dallas and ESEA are this weekend. It should be noted that in ESEAi Invite, EG hasn’t taken the top seed this time around, and only to add to the disappointing season, they didn’t even finish top 2 in the regular season, placing third behind Area51. They have to settle for the second seed after Finesse, although one could argue they don’t even deserve that with the third place finish in the season. Furthermore, two more teams have been added to the traditional 6 team roster, moving it up to a standard 8 team double elimination bracket.

Immediately after that tournament we have Arbalet Cup Dallas, the first North American Arbalet Cup, and first real international event in North America since 2007.

Finally an event I don’t have to watch out of one blood shot eye at three in the morning. 32 teams will face off, and it looks like the top8 in ESEA will compete in Arbalet Cup, seeing as they are in the city anyway, and hopefully the big names from Europe, like fnatic, SK-Gaming, Mousesports and Na’Vi will be competing in the tournament. Na’Vi better be there, seeing as they are going to events on Arbalet’s dime anyway.  Oh, nope, not anymore…