GotFrag CPL Preview Schedule | Intro to CPL | Predicted CPL Seeding

Welcome to GotFrag's CPL Summer 2003 Championship Preview! In the days to come, GotFrag is going to be providing a huge amount of content to help introduce every aspect of the upcoming event. We'll take a look at strats, players' and managers' emotions going into the event, issues like ghosting, and how we think things will pan out in the end. We'll get to all that content in a second, but before we do, let's take a look at the two questions posed by this article's title: who is going, and what's at stake?

Here are the 128 teams from around the world going to this tournament. 96 of them will compete in a preliminary single elimination bracket. The top 32 will move on to the second bracket, where they will join the 32 autoberthed teams. Here's a complete breakdown of how we think those teams will be seeded. From those 64 teams, 32 will move on to a double elimination tournament for first place and all the glory. And not just glory, of course: also a whopping $60,000 cash prize, out of the $200,000 total for the event. Here's the breakdown of the prizes:

1. $60,000
2. $42,000
3. $28,000
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4. $18,000
5. $12,000
6. $10,000
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7. $6,000
8. $4,000
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9. $3,000
10. $3,000
11. $3,000
12. $3,000
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13. $2,000
14. $2,000
15. $2,000
16. $2,000

That's a lot of money on the line, along with a lot of pride. Pride, not only on a local, team-based level, but also on a national level. People will definitely be watching hard this CPL to see how the Americans stack up against the Europeans: with TEC, 3D, GX and zEx all at their strongest, it looks like the European stranglehold on the top few spots may at long last be broken. SK and Team9, among others, will of course have a different view on the subject, and it's going to be one hell of a ride before we find out just how far American teamplay has come in the last six months.

To prepare you for that ride, we've got a few sets of articles on the way. Midway's Playbook, a new series of features, is specially designed to give you an inside look at how the best teams stay on top: they'll include brief interviews and loads of strategical analysis from the man himself, the John Madden of E-Sports, Trevor "Midway" Schmidt.

CPL Hopefuls will give you a window into the worlds of the teams that aren't going to be taking home sixty grand, but do hope to crack the top ten. These are the semi-professionals who keep the heart of the CS community pumping, the gamers who aspire to greater things and whose presence keeps the whole E-Sports machine in motion.

A special edition of Behind the Gamer this week will feature none other than Kyle "Ksharp" Miller from Team 3D, the most storied of all CPL competitors and one of the best Counter-Strike players in the world.

An editorial on LAN ghosting will examine how ghosting hurts the quality of European LANs, many of which allow players to speak while they're dead and nearly all of which allow players to take the few seconds as they're dying and tell their teammates where the enemy is. The CPL is really the only remaining major LAN tournament that maintains a strict policy of not allowing ghosting; we'll take a look at how this effects gameplay and competition.

Finally, special pieces on America and Europe—the Sleeping Giant and the Swedish Playground—will examine the top teams from each of the sides of the Atlantic, and offer some thoughts on how that rivalry has developed and will continue to develop. These thoughts—pensees, gedanken, tankar—combined with GotFrag's Pre-CPL Rankings and a set of predictions, will round out the preview. All in all, it's going to be a great time—stick around, and be sure to check the schedule; we'll update it every day with links to the articles.

GotFrag CPL Preview Schedule | Intro to CPL | Predicted CPL Seeding