This weekend has been action packed with two invite divisions from the fourth season of ESEA coming together in Dallas to battle it out for the top prizes. There are six 1.6 teams and four CS:Source teams in attendance.

Today we kicked off the actual double elimination bracket. The format that was used was a best-of-three format. The day started off pretty much as predicted for 1.6 with the higher seeds taking the wins.

Turmoil in Turmoil?????

Ok..ok! I know that some people have said this before. The question is what happened? They were EASILY able to excel right past Excello and then they seemed to hit a brick wall. This was a change of pace from last year when eMg upset Turmoil(then Gravitas) in the first round of the double elimination bracket.

They ended up facing compLexity after their Excello match and lost in two maps to them. The scores were 16-12 and 16-11. They then dropped down to the Lower Bracket to face Loaded. Loaded had just recently lost to DINC in the first round of the Upper Bracket. One would have thought that Turmoil would be the easy winner to pick from this match up.

Both teams put up one heck of a fight as two of the matches went into overtime. After the first match which Loaded took 16-13, the rest of the time it was a close game. With Turmoil going to China for WCG, everyone expected them to take top two or three at this event. It seemed that today was just not their day for CS and that they will have to regroup before China.

Did I just get DINC'd??

For many this team was a huge shock at this event. A lot of the people I knew did not think that this team would come anywhere close to a top three finish. Well, they did. They are still right in the middle of the action as they have taken out Loaded twice and Excello once. DINC's only loss came from EG in the second round of the Upper Bracket. This loss has a huge impact for the upcoming match, because it will be a rematch of the preview Upper Bracket Match.

This next match will decide it all for DINC. When they go to face off against EG this time they will be fighting for a little bit more than the second round of regular play. This time they are in the Lower Bracket Finals and are fighting for a shot to play compLexity in the Grand Finals. If DINC is able to win, this will be the first time in a while that the finals have not been against two of the top three teams in the US.

Excello Improves!

This is said very loosely. Excello came into this event as the last seed and did not get much farther. They started out the event with two quick losses to turmoil and then they were sent to the Lower Bracket. In the Lower Bracket they faced DINC and were able to pick up their first map win in the ESEA LAN Playoff history with the same core group of members. It seemed like Excello might be able to pull out something big, but DINC was there to stop their move and end their spree in the playoffs.

OMOT(Oh My Overtime)

I don't know about you, but this overtime thing seemed to go on and on, forever. Not as much for 1.6 but especially for Source. It seemed that just about every best-of-three had at least one map in overtime, if not two. This means that some of the matches were really drawn out. One of the best matches of the day was against i7 and Blight on the Source side. They ended up going into 6 Overtime Halves which amounted to 60 rounds of game play. Blight was able sneak out a win but went on to lose the best-of-three to i7.