After a full day of Counter-Strike action, it finally came to a wrap at 1:30am this morning. Just to take people through some of the highlights and lowlights from insomnia58, we have brought in a rather nifty way of keeping up on a daily basis.
For probably the first time in insomnia’s long and dark history, this was the first Counter-Strike tournament not to get disrupted by a CS update, or any kind of problem which would cause a delay. Games for the CS tournament managed to kick off at 1pm without the slightest hitch, and Jon “ViciousHorizion” Kelly and the rest of the admins there actually felt very relieved by all of this. Groups were out with 30minutes to spare, seeds were done an hour prior to start time, GOTVs were up and everyone seemed incredibly happy going into the first day.
In terms of groups, there were only a couple of surprises to really take note of. The first one would’ve been the Romanian Controversy where ebGaming_ took out XPC in their first game but were defaulted down to demos leaving the Romanian side to take the win and head through as top of their group. The other surprise worthy of note was when former ESL Premiership team XENEX failed to leave their group and instead saw themselves going out into the Intermediate tournament to the hands of Radix eSports in Group N.
Day one also featured the first round of the knock-out tournament, seeing the UK Masters finalists CAZ and FM wrap up a full set of 16 teams into the knockouts. There was only one real surprise on this round as seventh seed uFrag went out to the 9/12th seed of Enemies in Disbelief, a mix side of talent from rosters previously seen in Infused or the Ionic side that surprised many at the last iSeries LAN.
So Day Two is set to be a much more interesting feature. Will the Romanians manage a push straight to the final or will any other UK side manage to repeat the showing that ash and co managed in the groups to halt them. Will FM and CAZ manage to repeat their UK Masters final in another final to seek revenge? It’s all up in the air until Day Two of LAN ends with one side confirmed in the finals tonight.
