It’s been a long day here in Grapevine, Texas for the CPL Summer 2004 event. So far, the event is spectacular. The Gaylord Texan is amazing, quite luxurious, and was an excellent choice of venue for the event. You would be hard pressed to find someone in attendance that doesn’t like the location and presentation that the CPL has chosen.

That’s not to say it’s been all trouble free. If there’s one theme that’s plagued the day, it has to be Internet trouble. The BYOC is huge – easily the largest North American BYOC in recent memory (for an event with a major tournament), and has consumed an incredible amount of bandwidth, forcing the quality of the service down, and putting those who depend on it (like us) to dealing with the scraps we get. For anyone who watched the HLTV match for the CAL Invite finals, you know what I mean – it goes up and down, constantly. Hopefully it will settle down by tomorrow, and you will have the chance to enjoy HLTV for the up to 12 Counter-Strike games played simultaneously. The CPL staff is surely working their best to ensure it happens.

The tournament area is huge, and what we’ve heard is that the PC’s are excellent (like you would expect from the CPL). The CPL has gone the extra mile to cater to spectators and attendees, with a great spectator area (better than any other CPL event), and fantastic sponsor booths. There are literally hundreds of computers in the sponsor booths, playing the latest games on the latest hardware, and giving a lot of idle gamers a chance to have some fun.

There’s little else we can say about day 1 – it’s been fairly uneventful. The CAL-I finals, an opening speech by CPL president Angel Munoz, and a short concert have composed the day. We should have the Counter-Strike tournament seeds up shortly, and we’re hoping that HLTV will be available (in the same force that it has been for other CPL events) for tomorrow’s single elimination play. In the meantime, you can expect a few belated CPL preview articles to be online shortly – still in time for the start of the tournament.