8. SoA.swe (MAFIA) over All* – (0-1 in OT) (12-7) – CPL Holland – May 10th-13th, 2001

“Battle of NiP”

SoA.swe (MAFIA) Roster

HeatoN
Vesslan
Hyb
Medion
Trance
Bullet

All* Roster

XeqtR
Potti
VicoN
Majestic
Jackieboy

The battle of NiP members took center stage at the best CPL Europe event to ever take place. The level of competition at this event was legendary in the old school European CS scene.

Coming in NiP had split up. The key components for the future were now Heaton, Vesslan, Hyb, Medion, Trance, and Bullet all playing for SoA.swe and XeqtR, Potti, VicoN, Majestic and Jackieboy playing for AllStars. Later NiP would become Heaton, Hyb, Medion, Potti and XeqtR. Internal conflict would result in XeqtR leaving and both ahl and Vesslan being picked up for the CPL World Championship finals.

Either way, this match was key for everyone involved and set the tone for the future of European CS. Coming from the Winner’s bracket, SoA.swe dominated early tournament play beating Dutch Cp, German XL, Finish apostrophe, German SK, and Finish Z in the Winner Bracket Final. AllStar lost an early match to German mTw before rallying and winning against all comers to make the finals to face SoA.swe.

One key piece of CPL Europe and all European CS play were CO rules. CO stands for Chargers Only, meaning that only offensive round wins count towards a victory. So even if a team won 12 rounds on defensive but gave up five rounds to the offensive team and was only able to win one round on offensive, they’d lose. On top of this the games were played with a time limit.

With all of this in mind, the rules made it extremely hard to end up with a tie game, but that’s what happened in the first map on the newly created Dust2. This impressive match went into overtime with AllStar ending up winners. That forced another match on the old school map Dust. SoA.swe won with a 12-7 score taking the first big event in LAN CS for the International scene.