Now that the WCG USA 2006 event is over, I think it is a great time to touch on a very crucial subject. There are too many teams and players that end up at these USA final events that really do not deserve to be here. By the end of this article, I hope that “playing for the vacation” becomes a household term.

When groups or seeds are released, it is not very hard for anyone that keeps up with eSports news to simply take a quick glance, and already know who will advance and who is going home, and that really should never be the case. The only problem is that we see this entirely to often at USA final events.

The fact is, that there are too many players that are more concerned with what they are wearing rather than coming into an event properly prepared to take home a win.

Maybe this article idea only came to me because I have lived in Las Vegas for about eleven years and do not think that it is anything special. Well, I can name a handful of teams that arrived to my lovely city and were just happy not to be in their own.

Originally my plan for writing this article was to have weenus pretend to interview the lower tier teams of the tournament and ask questions such as, “How do you think you will perform in this event?” or, “What kind of practice schedule have you had the passed few weeks?”. Maybe even, “With teams like 3D and coL coming, have you scouted them at all?”. Just because I wanted to get quotes to implant into this article as factual proof that these players just came to have a good time and not to try and go to the world finals.

I have been an admin at this tournament, and some of the things I have seen, and some of the quotes I have heard, would be mind boggling to pretty much anybody.

Right now, I am going to pick on Mug N Mouse and with great reason. There are probably a lot of you sitting at home wondering why in a round of group play, a team would leave the server right after losing their 16th round, because it should be a standard to understand the rules of group play, even though it is not used in the USA tournaments all that much.

I will do a quick run down of how a three team group works. You play out every single round, especially in your first match, because in the unlikely event of a tie, the team to advance will obviously be the team with the most rounds won. I am probably the best example of this situation since when I was in Team 3D, we were the first team in ESWC’s history to ever tie all three of our matches and not advance due to the outcome of the final match.

I later overheard a comment off the record from some players saying, and I quote, “Nobody told us that if there was going to be a tie we would go based off of rounds”. And that is a prime example of a team that did absolutely no research before they left home to come compete for the title of USA’s best.

One of the most respected teams here, Team 3D, has had about ten conversations about the rounds won to rounds lost, because they assumed it would determine their seeding into the single elimination round. It isn’t that good of an example since the seeds were picked randomly, but the idea behind my point is still there; they are a team that wants to win, so they did some research before going into their upcoming matches.

I don’t have any phenomenal ideas of how to filter teams out that really don’t deserve to compete on this level, but it would be nice if they took this into consideration.

The whole world just witnessed zEx pull a huge upset and defeat coL on de_inferno (arguably coL’s best map), but zEx went into the match knowing that they had a great chance to win. When I was watching teams like Vigor and NetFragz play against Team 3D, they showed zero excitement in playing at all, and 3D walked all over them, just like everyone thought they would. But hey, at least they got a free trip to Vegas right?

A lot of people, even the players, love to claim that Counter-Strike is random, and they love to use the word “upsets”. But when you have teams that come to win, that’s exactly what they do.

I watched Glimpse of Reality playing JMC without a care in the world and manage to take them down and pretty much devastate their morale for their Pandemic match. Was that an upset in my opinion? No, GR wanted the win, and they got it. But, before GR goes and thinks I am giving them a lot of credit, I can also say that I was not surprised at all when GR realized that there was a great possibility that JMC could have beat Pandemic, and then we would have to use the rounds won situation. GR was sitting in the spectator area watching Pandemic dominate JMC without a care in the world, because at the end of the day they can say that they beat JMC and then go walk around the Las Vegas strip for the rest of the weekend because their play time is over.

All I can say in conclusion is that some people come to work, and some people come to play, and it is by no means fair to dedicated teams, fans, or tournament organizers to spend valued time on them just so they can waste theirs. So if anybody out there reading this happens to win some sort of berth to any national finals event around the world, once you get there, do us all a favor and don’t play solely for the trip.