Trademark Gamers

For those that have been paying attention recently you will know that the TMG CS 1.6 team will be at the WiredOut LAN event this weekend in Bedford, UK. With most of the UKs top teams in attendance, including Dignitas, it will be interesting to see how our team get on, especially as it is the first time this team has played on LAN together. This blog will try to give a recap of the action this weekend, the ups and down, funny stories (if I can remember them) and anything else of interest.

Day 1 - Friday:

Friday was pretty much a travelling day really with the whole team driving to Bedford, checking into the hotel and just relaxing before a heavy Saturday. Rich and Aaron caught the train to Chesterfield where I picked them, Andy caught the train to Stockport to drive down with Paul and Phil decided to be a loner and drive from Bristol.

We left at about 1.30pm and after taking a short break at Leicester Forest Services for a bite to eat managed to get to Bedford at just before 4pm. After checking into the hotel and waiting for everyone else to arrive; Phil got lost and ended up having to meet Paul and Andy at the station in Bedford and then driving back from Bedford to the hotel, we opted to wait until after rush hour before heading back into Bedford.

With Bedford having a one-way system around most of the town we spent some time trying to find somewhere to park and luckily it transpired it was just around the corner from the LAN centre. After parking we took a walk to the LAN centre, had a quick look around and then headed to Nandos to grab a bite to eat. After that we went back to the LAN centre to meet Piers (a guy who was taking some video footage over the course of the weekend) and went with him back to his hotel so he could do some interviews with the players before the action started on Saturday.

We did this for about an hour and did a brief Q&A for him before deciding it was time to get our heads down for some sleep before getting up early on the Saturday for our matches. That didnt quite go to plan as we got back to the hotel and started watching Halloween H2O on TV until we started to drop off to sleep. Even though this was the plan we ended up laying in our respective beds watching the end of the film until about 2am. We then tried to get some sleep but for Rich and I it was a non-starter with Aaron snoring like a freight train all night and even when we nudged him and asked him to stop he replied, rolled over and carried on and it transpired the next morning he didnt even wake up.

Day 2 - Saturday:

With the guys playing in the first group of the day we got up early (8am)  and headed to the LAN centre and arrived a little later than planned after Aaron decided he had lost his wallet and then spending 15 minutes searching for it in the room before realising it might be in the back of the car having fallen out of his pocket the night before. After walking out to the the car in preparation to leave we did indeed find his wallet and saved his graces but obviously it had made us a bit later.

Once we got to the centre we were straight into trying to set up and get games underway until Steam decided to rear its ugly head and start causing Steam Ticket Errors. This means the delays started and we didnt actually start our group games until about lunchtime after meant to be starting just before 10am. We managed to play 3 of our group games in pretty quick time on de_dust2, de_nuke and de_inferno with all reasonably easy scorelines and some great play from the guys. Aaron started strong on de_dust2 with Andy taking the reins on de_nuke and having a fantastic CT half. Everyone else was pretty solid throughout as the scorelines suggest and it was a good strong showing for the first days play.

After the first 3 games and with 2 left to play there was another delay as there were some serious PC problems for both the teams we had left to play who were stuck in a game against each other which meant we had to wait until they had finished. With the delays it meant the format changed and matches moved from MR15 to MR12 (as reflected in the reported scores on here and UK-CT.net) to try and get the games finished quicker.

We eventually managed to get the games done and out of the way with 2 more good wins; 13 - 8 and 13 - 2, which meant we topped the group with 5 wins out of 5 and could go and relax. Having packed up and given a few words to Piers about the days play we went back to the cars and started to do the drive back to hotel. On the way we stopped off to get a pretty good meal at a Harvester restaurant whilst also getting a few things from Tesco in preparation for breakfast on Sunday morning.

The food was pretty good and I think we were all stuffed at the end of it with Paul and I the only ones daring enough to venture in the dessert territory. Sufficiently satasfied after not having eaten properly all day we then decided to finally head back to the hotel, discuss the good and bad points of the day and chill with the TV. Shawshank Redemption followed by Match of the Day and then a good nights sleep before getting up on Sunday morning to see what happened during the night in terms of other results at the LAN.

I will attempt to try and do a minor update in the morning once we know what the brackets are looking like and when we know who we will be playing first.