GotFrag.com -The KODE5 Latin American Finals took place this last weekend in the CompuPalace Mall of Lima, Peru. I’ve covered many events for GotFrag in this side of the continent, but I had to admit that this was the most important for me. After many years of rivalries, discussions in forums and online leagues, finally the top gamers in Counter-Strike of our Latin nation would be able to battle to determine who’s the best. So a formal report wouldn’t be enough to reflect all the feelings and experiences that this event would generate, so I decided to write it more in a blog way. The tournament had eleven teams already qualified to the event, and the organizers decided to run some kind of BYOC-Qualifier called "KODE5 LastStance" during the two first days. From that qualifier, the following teams passed to the Latin Finals:

OneForce
MoNkeY
AK
LF
XuXaN

With the 16 teams now complete, the organizers determined that the first stage was a Group Play. After the opening of the event with a presentation of each Team (that included a Non-Bolivian representative as the Bolivian TeamLeader), the groups were determined as follows:

GROUP A: vLF, Punto.cL, qTp, gNr
GROUP B: MoNkeY, Sick-Gaming, NoVacancy, DeathZone
GROUP C: Art of War, XuXaN, NiceOne, ayaC
GROUP D: Artyk, XiX, AK, OneForce

With the groups established, everybody ran to GotFrag to download demos of their rival teams, and got ready for the next day. According to many experts that just appeared when the raffle was done, the hardest groups would be C and D. Only time would tell, because the world’s opinion had to wait due to the lack of a decent internet connection for the video stream and the HLTVs.

The Friday morning was very sunny and hot and the best action was about to start. With the B group switching times with C, the first matches would be the A and C ones. The group A started with Punto cL facing their friends of vLF who gave the Chilean champion a big surprise defeating them. As many people said, qTp from Panama would have a hard time on LAN, and they did, defeating online gNr. In the end, the group A was from Chile with the two teams of that country passing to the next stage. Meanwhile, one of the Peruvian favorites XuXaN, was falling under the Art of War game, with a close score of 16-14. The comments of the Mexican guys after the match only increased the support of the public for the Peruvian teams, but it wasn’t enough for XuXaN, that lost with the Argentinean team. The Mexicans dominated their group, being the first qualified team together with NiceOne.

After a short stop because the power supply had to have a maintenance, groups B and D started. Both Peruvian tops, MoNkeY and Artyk were in the game area, and while the first ones had a relatively easy group (they even won 16-0 one match), the controversy started in the Artyk vs XiX encounter. The old rivalry because of the cheating incident in the Sprite Cup 2007 revived, when XiX asked the referees to check the Windows Registry of Artyk’s PCs. They adduced that Artyk changed the DoubleClickSpeed value, and that would be an illegal advantage in-game, even when It can be changed from the Mouse Driver. Artyk agreed, but it only generated a clear anti-XiX feeling in the public that followed them into the finals. With those conditions, Artyk defeated XiX and qualified as first in their group, with outstanding victories over the other Peruvian teams.

The day one was over, and the brackets were already established. Once again, the teams returned to the hotel to visit GotFrag and try to find out any secret strategies from the rivals. However, it was Friday night, and most of the Latin teams can’t avoid their usual weekend party. So imagine around 50 gamers distributed in different parts of the Miraflores Park (one of the most centric places of the city), checking their watches every 5 minutes to calculate how much time do they have before they have to go to sleep the exact time to be ready for the matches. Indeed, Lima is a city that never sleeps. I even heard that some of them returned 6am to the hotel, and the competition started at 9am.

The second day continues on page 2!