How will CPL Winter 06 feel different to the spectators and participants?

The Winter Championship Finals was originally designed to be an intimate gaming event that would close this year's chapter of worldwide esports competitions. But more than twice the amount of people have registered for this event than last year's winter event and we still have not announced any event activities beyond the tournaments.

On the tournament side we have top teams and top 1v1 gamers registered, so I am personally excited to watch some awesome matches and hopefully also a few tournament surprises.

On the spectator side we have of course partnered with GotFrag, which has the largest exhibition space we have ever dedicated to an esports news organization. I honestly believe that GotFrag will hit a huge homerun in online and live coverage and that they may help raise the bar for the entire industry.

Outside of the competition some of the things that attendees will experience at the event are, open discussions about esports with some top people in the gaming industry. Cohesion Productions will unveil a special preview of their almost completed esports television documentary. Serendipity Films will show their CS-inspired film and will have a prize contest that will get some people's attention, and we are introducing a few cool things including the new Razer Copperhead "CPL" Special Edition Gaming Mouse (shameless plug).

We still have a few free spectator passes available because of last minute cancellations, so for those that would like to join us at the winter event please register at https://www.thecpl.com/register/?page=specialspecpass&eventid=21

Congratulations on the release of the CAL Anti Cheat, do you think that this tool will convince several top CS teams to return to the league? With the CPL using CAL as a qualifier for the CPL Winter World Season Championships does the absence of 3D, coL, and Pandemic from CAL Invite make this a worthwhile qualification process?

CAL was never meant to cater to just a few top teams, but to serve as a general introduction to tens of thousands of gamers to CPL-inspired online competitions. The goal of ACS is to provide the community with better opportunities of fair competitions online, which will then justify granting more CPL seeding weight to CAL results. If in the process some CS teams are once again attracted to CAL, we would view that as a positive.

ACS (which we fondly refer to as "axe") was developed from the ground up by our new programming group, but it's only the first step on our goal to make CAL a complete desktop solution for PC online gaming. We are still working on our development map, but it is safe to say that the community should expect more desktop CAL components to be released next year.

In past interviews you stated that the reason CAL is amateur is because it is over the internet and not played on LAN, is it a possibility that online play in North America could ever rise to the same level of professionalism as the P in CPL? Do you think a league similar to ESLs Pro Series would work in North America with regular show matches and a LAN final?

Professionalizing online competitions has become somewhat of a personal obsession for me lately, so I will contain myself from downloading a thesis on the subject. For now let's just say that we are taking small but significant steps in that direction. For example, our exclusive partnership with GameRail, CPL PlayLinc, ACS and our new projects (to be announced) should soon add up to an entire reconstruction of CAL's online experience. With added security, verification and reliability these matches will culminate at live CPL events without the controversy that is somewhat associated with online competitions.

In the past we heard CPL contemplating making a portion of CAL pay to play, I apologize if you updated the status of this idea but I can't find anything one way or another. What is the status of this?

The primary goal of CAL is to continue to be the premiere center for *free* online gaming tournaments in the USA. In fact, we are fearful that online prize money, betting on matches and pay for play will attract legal issues because of the new online betting laws, and regardless of how enamored some teams may be with the concept of earning money through online competitions, it's definitely not worth the risk to us. Therefore no one should expect CAL to trail down that path.

On the positive side, CAL continues to experience phenomenal membership growth and we are very excited about our new vision and development plan for CAL.

Final words?

Yes! I would like to finalize this interview by thanking the CPL sponsors: AMD, ATI, Pizza Hut, BenQ, Plantronics, Razer, Insomnia365, Directron, Steel Series and AGEIA. Also thanks to all of the companies that assisted Directron with the CPL tournament systems: AMD, ATI, Razer, Thermaltake, Asus, Corsair, Cooler Master, Seagate, SteelSeries, BenQ and others.

And special thanks to all of our friends and fans that during the initial uncertainties of 2006 did not lose faith that CPL and CAL would resurface better, faster, stronger