Both teams will look to start the tournament off on Friday, April 21st with a critical victory in two of the three following maps: Nuke,Train and Dust2. Their group should be daunting and an opening round loss for either team could spell trouble later on in the tournament.

With 4Kings and Catch-Gamer also in their group, SK.swe and wNv are the favorites to advance, but all four teams are listed in the GotFrag World Rankings. SK.swe is currently the top ranked team in the world and received 24 of 26 possible votes from a selection of top players and community members. wNv is right behind with a second place ranking while also earning one of the other two outstanding first place votes.

wNv comes in as defending WEG Champions having won WEG Season 3 at the end of 2005. The Chinese team defeated Project_kr, another WEG Masters team, 2-1 in a best-of-three match with 16-7 (Nuke), 16-11 (Inferno) victories and a 6-16 loss on Project_kr’s best map Dust2. wNv picked up $50,000 for its victory and hopes to earn another $70,000 for first place in this WEG tournament.

wNv’s only major international tournament outside of WEG 3 was ESWC 2005. In that event they won their opening round group and advanced in their second round of group play only to lose to Mousesports in single elimination play; they finished 5th-8th. Outside of events in China, wNv is lacking in experience against WEG Masters-level competition.

Still, wNv should have an advantage on its home turf here against SK.swe. The Swedes will be playing at WEG for the first time which should be a bit of an experience. SK.swe success has been found mostly in five day tournaments with many matches against world-class competition compared to one match a day spread out over a multi-week period here at WEG.

SK.swe’s track record over the past year has seen more bright spots than negative ones, but there is some room for concern. Their CPL UK performance left something to be desired finishing a disappointing 7th-8th after being knocked out by 4Kings, setting the stage for a critical rematch should SK falter versus wNv.

The bright spots though are glaring as their two CPL victories helped SK.swe maintain their world-class status. Their more recent CPL Winter Championship was against what many consider to be the best field of teams ever assembled for an international CS competition. An epic match versus American Team 3D defined their run. Going into triple overtime, SK.swe outlasted 3D 25-22 and moved on to claim another championship.

The pressure is squarely on SK.swe’s shoulders as they are expected to win this tournament, and that should make the defending WEG champions wNv a scary opening opponent. They’ll need to rely on clutch play from their top fragger Abdisamad “Spawn” Mohamed. He led the team in scoring in almost all statistical categories for CPL Winter 2005 posting a 0.881 FPR (Frag Per Round) good for seventh best among all tournament attendees and a 92 DAR (Damage Average per Round) good for seventh as well.

Notes

wNv will be making their Gamesense premier with this match as none of their players was included in the statistical database previously… wNv’s other team, wNv.cn, played at CPL Singapore along with other tournaments which causes confusion for some people…Christrian “Vilden” Lidström recently under went surgery but is in attendance and should play for SK.swe in all of their matches for WEG Masters 2006…SK.swe has been winning on average 69% of their total CT rounds played, ninth best among all Gamesense registered teams, compared to 57% on the terrorist side, 14th among all teams.

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