GotFrag eSports

By Ben �functioN� Winkworth

The Coverage

It's that time again and GotFrag is here once more with all your pre-CPL Summer coverage! Kicking things off this year is our CPL introduction, giving you the lowdown on all five of this year's CPL tournaments. That's right, this time Call of Duty, Halo, UT2K4 and Painkiller all get a mention too, as well as the ever popular Counter-Strike tournament! We will provide the basic info for all the tournaments. For in depth information on the teams attending and their chances of winning, check out our previews of each tournament later on in the preview.

We'll once again be updating our own GotFrag World rankings taking into account the recent ESWC and Everlan tournaments, as well as the many recent roster changes teams have been desperately trying to finalize for the biggest eSporting event of the summer. GotFrag will also be breaking down some of the big matches from the last few weeks, such as Virtus.Pro's big win over SK.swe at the ESWC in France two weeks ago. We'll also be delivering extensive articles highlighting just what really is going on in the eSport's world today.

This time, GotFrag is bringing you several great player profiles of some of the world's hottest players such as Mousesport's recent pickup of r4id and Brazil's most-famous eSporting entity Kikoo. There'll also be some interesting Articles such as �Changes in CounterStrike� where Midway takes an indepth look into the competitive cs world after the money changes and the affects it has had on many teams that are attending this CPL. There'll be more extensive previews of the Call of Duty, UT2K4 and Halo tournaments coming up right around the corner too.

GotFrag visitors will also be subject to both America and Europe's finest which is where we take a look at some of the top teams attending the event from the US and Europe. South American Invasion takes a look into some of the South American teams attending the CPL � that�s right, MIBR isn�t the only South American team attending. There will be coverage of the final CPL Qualifier in Spain as well as live coverage of the usual Lethal Gamers Pre-CPL tournament with Midway and Viiraxe on location. With the CAL-invite finals set to take place early this CPL, Brooks takes a look at zEx and Rival and their chances at winning it all. But wait... There's more! This summer GotFrag are taking you on the Road to the CPL, and bringing you the Top 5 Rounds in Counter-Strike, ever! So buckle that seat belt and prepare yourselves for GotFrag's CPL Summer coverage, it's the next best thing to being there!

The Event

The highly anticipated CPL Summer 2004 event will be taking place at the Gaylord Texan Resort, in Texas of course! Starting July 28th, attending players and spectators alike will be subject to quite a spectacle, with huge exhibitions resembling games show similar to E3 or something to that effect. On entrance to the Gaylord Texan Resort, people attending will find it extremely difficult to get to any of the tournament areas without experiencing an overload of advertisement. The primary sponsors of the event nVidia and other major companies all have exhibitions on the floor. To be honest though, the amount of money these sponsors must be pouring into this event is easily deserving of these giant exhibitions.

The CPL is renowned for going smoothly. Very smoothly. Seven months ago at CPL Winter, they had VALVE technicians on the floor to make sure there were no glitches with what was at the time, a relatively new piece of software, Steam. Considering VALVE technicians were absent from the CXG event a month later, which went disastrously due to problems with Steam, it�s obvious that the ones attending the CPL must have helped greatly. We can be sure the CPL will have made as many, if not more arrangements to make sure this, one of the largest CPL�s to date goes as smoothly as possible.

Check out the next few pages for information on each individual tournament!

User Comments

Am I the only one that thinks the CS tourney should be a lot more in prize money. 100,000 seems quite a bit low. Especially since CS brings more spectators and gamers than any other game. Also, are the GeForce 4 ti4600's really good enough to get 100 fps in all situations including zooming through smoke etc? I'd assume they could drop down below 50 in a lot of situations...I just think nvidia coulda spent a little more and bumped em up to like fx5700's or something. . .

This comment was edited at 07/23/2004 8:59 PM

High Velocity Transcortical Lead Therapy | #phiya

last summer it was 60 k for first , double of what it is this year :/ with the same ammount of teams.

This comment was edited at 07/23/2004 9:01 PM

They spent all their moeny upgrading the computers

prize money is a big issue =X

#2 you're right, but nothing descent for the second, third...

I'd just like to mention that [GBR]Titans are Singaporean, and not from China! :)

Dion Appana | UltraUnix Internet Services | http://www.ultraunix.net/offer/

I can't wait for CS:Source, not because I want to play it, but because the Source engine will be MUCH more attractive to sponsors and will probably result in larger prizes. Larger, anyway, then what the dated HL engine could garner..

cpl summer 2003 had a total of 200k for cs tourney right?

The picture in my profile isnt me.

man, when hl2 and doom3 come out, everyone can say good bye to 24$ a month private servers (from a crappy company) there gonna be more like 40-50 for a crappy 12 man priv, and like 80-100 for a 12 man prv from Game daemons

I wonder if CS:Source will be used for Winter CPL 2004. :o

awesome, cs gets the worst computers out of the ones available

This comment was edited at 07/23/2004 10:19 PM

you a fool!

#11 thats because cs is 5 years old, and no other game is. but still 3.06 ghz and gf4 ti 4600 is enough to run cs at 100 fps pretty much constant

blizzah u never know about steam....

i thought last year had like 250k goin towards cs... they prob wasted money on the PK, Halo, and UT comps which are being played by .00000000000001 percent of gamers. Pardon my ignorance, but cmon now

WOW NICE PRIZE MONEY. NOT. LETS THINK, 30K BETWEEN 5/6 PEOPLE..UMM YEAH NICE ONE CPL.

You can enter a signature that will appear on your forum posts, and a small biography for your profi

Seems the only thing this tourney is good for is bragging rights? I remember when the prize money was much more than this... It seems as if the more cs becomes popular the less prize money is offered?

and thats only first place to #15, it must suck for the other people having to divide 10k or less between 5-6 people + manager + traveling expenses

nice write-up ben :)

Teams are just gonna have to be more marketable like 3d to make money and not rely on tournaments for income. The sponsorships are where the money is at, Team3d, SK and NOA, have figured that out, why hasn't anyone else?

#teamccp CS:S I play source because its fun. I play 1.6 because its fun. You play whatever you think is fun and plz let others do the same. -sestrugen

haha they better have Valve techies there cuz with the new update and all its bugs, cpl is a CXG waiting to happen. They better put up a sign, "If You Awp, People Will Drop".

about prize money, from the cs page, it looks as if the prize money is the same not less. sorry if im wrong.

This comment was edited at 07/24/2004 3:12 AM

Its nice to see how far esports has progressed. I mean think back to 3 or 4 years ago and players were only able to make $5/6k from winning major tournaments like these. Now they're able to win.... well, the same amount. Nevermind eh. Oh and the CPL's game selection is terrible. Half the players that competed at the ESWC painkiller competition said the game sucks, god knows what the general community must think of the game. Halo's community hasn't been quiet since the last CPL, its been non existant. COD is too similar to CS and gets very little attention in Europe, can't say I'm looking forward to that one either. UT2k4 dual would've been preferable to TDM but at least you'll see some big name European teams there I guess, still it'll hardly set the world alight. It astounds me the CPL continues to overlook WC3 though. Is Blizzard not offering you guys enough money or something? Quake3 was dropped like 2 years prematurely aswell. I think it says a lot for how much the CPL is able to dictate a games popularity when competitively Q3 is still ahead of the various POS games the CPL has tried to replace it with the last few years (AVP2 anyone?).

great write up Ben except for one thing: CPL is an organization so "its" is the correct possessive instead of "their"

http://home.cwru.edu/~ssw10/background.JPG

btw is says on #fatla1ty that hes competeting in CoD not PK mabey you should go check mr write-up man :o

#21 Sponsors aren't willing to pay as much for having their name attached to a CS tourny anymore, CS is a five year old ugly game that runs crap on computers that were made 2 1/2 years ago or more... not exactly what you'd want to be associated with.

Hopefully CS:S will be better on those fields (which it probably will), and (with huge luck) Valve will also for once listen to the professional gamers so they will make it more fast-paced again and with less of the delays and stuff that make the game so newb-friendly and spectator-unfriendly.

And I agree WC3 is a great competetive platform.

#23 well all I know is that he's on the competitor's list for Painkiller, and that he's only allowed to participate in 1 game.

This comment was edited at 07/24/2004 5:02 AM

nice to see that the dod community is bigger than cod and bigger than halo and pk combined with 4 cal divisions. w/e ill be at byoc with my dod team.

cpl should get their act together and bring back CPL europe. The weak feild undermines this summers competition, If they put the same effort into CPL europe as the USA it would be amazing.

#24 - " Sponsors aren't willing to pay as much for having their name attached to a CS tourny anymore, CS is a five year old ugly game that runs crap on computers that were made 2 1/2 years ago or more... not exactly what you'd want to be associated with"

You know, that's funny. How many people does any other game attract there again? Not as much as CS? And StarCraft is a much much better game to play competetively than WC3, seeings how WC3 is already dying and Brood War is gaining popularity again.

#24 CS may not look great but in terms of player numbers it beats the likes of cod and unreal tourney hands down. If the sponsors don't want to be associated with CS why are teams like SK, 3D, NoA and 4K sponsored by the likes of nvidia, intel, ati, abit etc? Budweiser didn't sponsor the last world cup in the hope that people will drink beer believing it'll make them better footballers, they did it to put their brand out to a large audience.

#27 How is WC3 dying? Its far bigger in Europe and America than Brood War right now and as a competetive platform its still growing. We've just seen the biggest ever wc3 tournament to date 2 weeks ago and only the other day it was announced 4K are moving to Korea to compete professionally there. Not to mention its still being supported by Blizzard with regular patches. It would make FAR more sense to me for the CPL to use WC3 than painkiller or halo (or SC).

#27 that's not the point. And SC isn't a better game to play competetively, it's just more popular, though WC3 is gaining populatiry even in Korea over SC slowly.

#28 They are sponsored because the game has such a big following, and that's all. They're not showing off their hardware which in this sector is a big issue unlike in the soccer world cup, where the brands have nothing to do with the sport at all.

Plus, sponsoring a team is different from sponsoring a tournament. The spectators see NVIDIA and ATI and whatnot appearing in the players names, that like on peaks such as the ESWC finals maybe 20000 people live and I would guess thesame amount downloading it afterwards. For the CPL sponsors, they only get a booth and some minimal media exposure. If they would be sponsoring a tournament for a new(er) game, people would be impressed faster. Sorry but 100 FPS on CS just isn't interesting, even despite the fact that the game runs so badly because what is shown on the screen is ugly. If a tourny computer can run DOOM 3 smooth I'll look at what's inside it.

cant beleive theyre not doing WC3. sucks

errrr halo wtf ?

Ahhhh! The COLORS...

I cant stand wc3

Your signature appears at the bottom of every post that you make on Gotfrag.

When you deal with money, and sponsors, things can get shifted around.
I see that once the CPL stabilizes a concrete venue to accomodate around 3000-5000 players they will have to factor in extra costs in the area of rental fees, computer fees, extra staff fees (for the larger venue this summer) and various sponsors who are willing to support the CPL.

There is a lot of "I scatch your back, you scratch mine" that happens in the sponsorship arena, but is crucial to get a tournament such as this size able to even occur. Its understandable that their prize purse is slightly lower this event, and which games are being played.

I would have preferred a RTS game at the CPL event though, they have a much larger participation and spectator demographic. Though I do admit, these games are a bit older and perhaps the sponsors want to create interest in the newer games.

I will be happy that if several years down the road the CPL has stabilized its venue situation, therefore able to up the prize purse for the games available. I see it happening, but it will take some time.

To whoever:

Do wc3 leagues get 100,000 attendance often?

More people play BW right now than WC3. That means on the entire planet.

yeah but wc3 is bigger in the west.

For the record Vavle was not at the Winter 2003 Event in any for of Technical Support. Cliffe did stop by the event for a few days after the tournament had already been underway. Valve will not be at this event either. CXG failed to a lack of planning not from lack of support.

Its a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake.

#34 just because more people play it doesn't make it better as a competetive platform. Just because the entire planet plays pokemon that doesn't mean there are major tournaments for the game.

#23 - taken from the fatal1ty site :

Fatal1ty going for 4 in a row! Fatal1ty is the 3 Time reigning CPL Champion Player of the Year, and will be defending his title this year by playing PainkilleR at the Cyberathlete EXTREME World Championships July 28th - August 1st! http://www.thecpl.com

Oh my God, a clan name [GBR]Titans, what a ripoff. :)

#38 It'd be so cool if he'd pick up a 4th, I'm not sure whether I should root for Fat or Vo0, want both to win really :)

In my opinion it's quite obvious that the CPL are trying to phase out Counter-Strike, hopefully to make way for CS:S assuming it doesn't run like crap.

eSports united ~ #eSu @ quakenet

money is a great part of counter-strike's big events but I think when you play to win it shouldnt be about how much or how little just a love of the game.

#exse

#42 But Counter Strike wouldnt exist if not for the money provided :P

money doesnt say anything about your game nor do your sponsors, just enj0y and plaY ure gamE!

This comment was edited at 07/28/2004 11:33 PM

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