Waking up with the initial call from reception which was set at 9 AM, I went dowstairs after a quick shower. Ballroom is on the “-2” floor, with a little saloon kind of area outside. There was an open buffet set up in that open area, and most tickets for food and drinks were given to gamers and media people. Many people were surprised that there was lentil soup for breakfast, which is not uncommon in Turkey.

Thirty minutes later, Torbull comes out of the ballroom doors and joins our table to report on the ongoings. Looks like Craig stayed up all night and helped out the GameFrontier guys to set up the tournament and seeds. We learn that everything is almost ready, and people are about to be called in. Few minutes later, Lioukin comes out cursing and informs us that the whole tournament area was initially plugged into a single switch, and some of the wires were burning hot. This causes the tournament to be delayed another 45 minutes or so, but Craig announces the first round matches anyway.

There are 4 Painkiller servers run at a time, so it means 4 matches can be played at once. To be the quickest in this setup, Craig decides to have the tournament brackets run not vertically, but horizontally. So the winners after each match keep sitting and they play the winners of the other match, and new first round matches get played in the losers seats.

Around 1 PM, gamers are called inside, to start setting up. I learn that the initial 5mbit connection that we’re supposed to have is not going to happen for the day, so Steam can’t run. They decide to postpone the CS tournament to the next day, hoping that the internet issue would be solved so we can have Steam running and HLTV connected, as well as TsN broadcasting live.

Before first matches start, I’m told that I can not stand behind the gamers to spectate them, and I’m supposed to go back to the spectator area. This was totally unacceptable and it totally diminished my reporting abilities. Talking with the Turkish organizers for 20 minutes or so, I saw that they weren’t in charge for the day and all they could do was telling me to talk to Scott or GameFrontier people. After a quick chat with Scott Valencia, he agreed that I would be let inside to watch matches, update brackets and write stuff to keep GotFrag updated.

Updating wasn’t quite easy as we still were on the original hotel wireless. I watch the best first round match, Sakh vs Ztrider which Sakh won to advance to the next round. By now, I’m getting excited as wombat’s match versus forrest from PlayIt is about to be played. Mark got one of the hardest draws in the tournament, but he had a very good showing regardless.

Once again, Craig the Man, lets me use his laptop to update stuff since they can’t provide me with a computer with internet connection as they promised before the event. Sean and Jared get easy first round draws, both playing turkish guys and having no big problems. Mark’s match started at about 5 PM. After losing a very close first map sacred 16-14, he figured out forrest’s style and won the other 2 games convincingly, with 20+ frag differences. After watching him, I go asking the GameFrontier guys if I could get the seeds and brackets as it’s almost morning in United States and it’s time to make a post. I get “No” as the answer, so I had to wait couple more hours until they rotated from the particular laptop which had spreadsheets with seeds and brackets, and ask another guy to get them.

Since it’s real hard to access GotFrag by then, I send keemo the brackets and he converts them into HTML for me, which was a big relief. Games are still going on, and it’s time for wombat’s second match, this time versus Fatal1ty. Mark had the lead in both games, but Fatal1ty came back in last couple of minutes to get the win, sending him to the lower bracket. I see cha0ticz is playing LeXeR, who was actually one of the strong favorites to win this tournament. After a couple minutes of watching I see that it wasn’t really possible as LeXeR’s game looked sloppy and Jared managed to beat him in 3 games.

Things are going pretty good, minus the tournament machines which were said to be Celerons with NVIDIA 5500 video cards. Since the CS tournament is postponed, with the addition of couple more servers we get many PK matches going. I watch many matches up to winner quarter finals and losers third round, which I will write about later.

Games finish at around 1 AM, and I do a little more updating until 2 AM. I go up to my room with Cagdas’s laptop and write my Day 2 journal, and upload 30 megs of pictures with a 64K up wireless connection. That took me about 2 hours and I went to sleep around 5 AM, trying to get as much sleep as possible for Saturday, which will be the last day of the tournament with the whole Counter-Strike tournament and 12 players in Painkiller remaining.