The day of reckoning begins and even before noon controversy strikes. With some interesting matches surrounding the top team in the World, SK.swe falls in a tough first half 7-5 after falling behind 7-1. That’s only the start of the story though as SK.swe quickly disputed after the half ended resulting in a protracted review of demos.

The CPL staff spent 15 minutes reviewing the HLTV demo of the match before coming to a conclusion. During the 8th round of the match one of the TAG members exited the radio room of de_nuke and threw a flashbang under the box according to the CPL. The ruling from the tournament directors was that the flash throw wasn’t conclusive enough to force a forfeit as the CPL rules dictate but did warrant a two round overturned in SK.swe favor. The result was a swap now 7-5 in SK.swe favor instead of the game’s actually 7-5 TAG final. CPL’s decision to not follow the exact letter of the rules was due to the uncertain of the actually situation according to the CPL. The second round that SK.swe received from the CPL was due to the save out round that followed the disputed.

SK.swe’s pre-event hype hasn’t been as large as usual but there’s no denying they are still considered the best team in the World. Coming into the match they hadn’t received a scare like many of the other teams near them in the World rankings. NoA has received two close matches dropping the first to TAU yesterday and barely surviving a 2-10 first half to Gamewyze only to come back and win 11-1 in the second half of de_cpl_mill.

Other teams haven’t had it much easier with 3D sneaking by a very good Gamers.nu squad in Overtime, 16-12. The Brailizan g3x has also had an event filled CPL with back to back close matches. Their first match was a 13-11 win over a strong American team, e7 followed by a close win over the very strong and well known 4Kings, 13-7. They’ll now await the winner of D-Sky against mibr.