Competition

Last Sunday, I went for my first ever LAN competition (the competition was played in Counter Strike:Source or CS:S for short): The Steel Series Singapore Pro Shootout 2009. It was all a mixture of feelings for me. Nervousness, obviously, as it was the first time I was taking part in a LAN competition and excitement as I was about to meet the various Source players I had encountered in-game. My team (element 5) and I arrived at the venue at the allocated time (... just barely. Markus, my team mate, conveniently overslept and almost didn't make it in time). When we were told that we would be facing Xtreme Chaotix (they are one of the Singapore CS:S giants) in the first round, we were puzzled. We were expecting a coin toss between the team leaders to either pick the opponent or the map for the first round. Turned out we misinterpreted the tournament rules and that the coin toss was only used to pick the map for the first round. Live draws were held to decide which teams would face which teams earlier before we had arrived (according to something I just read a few minutes ago...).

Xtreme Chaotix (or XtC for short) won the coin toss and decided on playing the map, de_nuke. My team, element 5 was then allowed to pick which side we would play the first half on (either Counter-Terrorist or Terrorist). Since de_nuke was a "Counter-Terrorist" map, we had chosen to play Counter-Terrorist first. We played better than I had expected, winning the first half 9-6. Though, I have to admit that I made a few mistakes in the game and felt that my personal performance was just... above average. It could have been better. Then, came our... problem. My team didn't really practise any tactics for de_nuke (actually... we didn't really came up with ANY strategies for the tournament at all). Thus, we had to come up with plans on the spot. Expectedly, we lost the second half 10-4 to lose the match 16-13. We all ended up thinking,"So close yet so far..." However, to think back now... the score could have been worse for us. It was just that we picked the correct side for the first half, Counter-Terrorist (there isn't much tactics for the Counter-Terrorist side... just prevent the Terrorists from planting the bomb and letting it explode) If we had picked Terrorists, we would have lost at a bigger margin. Then again, even if we had won, we would have to face team TitaNs, one of Singapore's most recognized teams, in the next round and there was no way we were gonna be able to beat them.

Nevertheless, I stayed on to watch the other teams in action. This was when I was a disturbing scene. In the match for 3rd/4th placing, 'Mankind', of team Synergy, was screaming his head off at 'Pandemic', of team Synergy too. The shocking part was that 'Pandemic' was 'Mankind''s younger brother and that in almost every sentence, there was vulgarity. I too have a younger brother but I would NEVER scream profanities at him. It just wasn't right. Besides, all the screaming was bound to demoralize 'Pandemic' and in the process, he wasn't able to play well. He even quit CS:S after the LAN tournament. Man... what 'Mankind' did was not right...