Another event, another set of predictions down the drain. And you know your predictions aren’t doing well when only one of your top three teams finishes in the top five. Oy. .200 is a batting average even Adam Dunn can laugh at. I could sit here and write many pages about how stupid I am, but instead I’m going to focus on the positives: how some teams just exceeded expectations. And with that, here are the Buy.com LAN winners.
Winners
3. Pandemic – They won, but everybody expected them to win (even I got that one right). The Counter-Strike 1.6 field was shallower than a celebrity marriage. There were a couple decent teams like Turmoil, x3o, and immiNent Demise, but nobody on Pandemic’s level. JMC, Pandemic’s only rival, didn’t attend.
So they get a pat on the back for taking care of business, but they didn’t set the world on fire. Their matches against Turmoil were pretty close – 16-12 in the Grand Finals and 22-18 in the Upper Finals, which was a little bit unexpected. I haven’t been giving a lot of credit to Turmoil because of the lack of 1.6 depth (it’s pretty easy to beat up on worst teams), but they took Pandemic into OT in CEVO as well, along with finishing 1-1 against JMC. This is my official “give dap to Turmoil” paragraph, which guarantees a tank job in the next two weeks.
2. Eric “brawwr” Neer – There’s nothing like carrying your Counter-Strike: Source team at a LAN to make a person a little more e-popular. If you’re like me, you knew next to nothing about brawwr before the LAN. And, if you’re like me, you still know next to nothing about him except that he can carry a team with his AWP when he gets hot. He was the main reason my prediction for rSports went so terribly wrong.
I don’t have any statistics to back up how well he played, but there are other methods. Namely, the amount a player carries a team is directly proportional to the number of forums posts and threads about him. And judging by all the “brawwr for MVP!” and “where can I DL brawwr’s .cfg?!” posts … he was just short of being accused of hacking (in a good way).
(Speaking of statistics, whatever happened to Gamesense? It seems like one out of every four matches are reported, at best. For a sport that’s so rooted in technology, you’d think there’d at least be a box score for most matches. Right now Gamesense is still technically listed as being a beta version. I think GotFrag and the CSPromod developers are having an anti-race – who can release their new product the slowest.)
1c. Check-Six
1b. rSports
1a. Forbidden
I couldn’t really choose between the three of them, so I’m cheating and giving them all the top spot. They all have an auto-berth into the CGS qualifier, the team make-ups are all similar (more on this near the end), and they all exceeded expectations by about the same amount. Every time I picked one over the other, I’d argue myself out of it. So this spot is like a good hacking movie: the hacker feels good about his skillz, the moviemaker feels good for making fun of him, and the viewers have a good time watching it … everybody wins.
Check-Six’s tournament was a little less impressive than the others. They didn’t have to play Hyper, a good team even during an off tournament. They didn’t quite blow people out of the water like rSports and Forbidden did. Don’t get me wrong, they earned the third place finish. I just don’t think they dominated the way rSports and Forbidden did. They did manage to give rSports one of their two losses (a 10-9 overtime victory, which rSports later repaid with a 10-4 whoopin’). Overall it was a good showing for them, and I’m sure they’re thrilled with the spot in the CGS Qualifying tournament.
rSports, official team of Eric “brawwr” Neer, had an excellent tournament. They lost two matches by a total of three rounds and they were the only team to beat Forbidden before losing 8-10 in the Grand Finals. (If you’re wondering about the weird round scores and you’ve having been following CGS, rules have been changed for the eventual TV coverage. Instead of having two 15-round halves, there are only 9 rounds in a half. Basically, losing 10-8 is the equivalent of losing 16-14 in the old round system.) In the new Source Pwnage Rankings I mentioned that rSports lost 4-26 to 3D in CEVO, and of course that factored into my prediction for them. What I didn’t know was that there were a lot of strange circumstances for that match – their stratcaller couldn’t play, and a couple roster situations were coming to a head, as well. They’ve been a little overlooked (especially by Yours Truly), but I guarantee that’s not going to happen anymore. The only thing missing from their coming out party at the LAN was a banner and a cake.
As for Forbidden, they were clearly the class of the LAN. They only lost once and they spanked Hyper 10-4. The core of the team is basically the core of the old verGe team that was the Red Sox to EFG’s Yankees. I only wish that the team was competing in the CEVO playoffs, it’s a shame for the fans that we don’t get to see them play against 3D and coL until … uh … I don’t even know when. For now we’ll just have to live off the memory of them running through the competition at this LAN. This was the one team that lived up to the hype, although based on their finish they still might have been underestimated. Of course, not everybody did so well, and there were three teams in particular that had a disappointing tournament.
Losers
3. verGe – This ties into Forbidden, as mentioned. Think they want a do-over on their roster changes? I wouldn’t dare call the players they have now bad, but it’s clear there’s something missing. It might be chemistry, it might be ingame leadership, but I don’t think it’s skill. The pieces are all there, but they’re not fitting.
So that, of course, leads to more roster changes, which only exacerbates their team chemistry problems. What’s one of the biggest things the best teams have in common (most notably coL and 3D, but also Pandemic and JMC in 1.6)? Stability. Not just as organizations, but in their rosters. They pick up players that fit together. They don’t try to create an all-star lineup based solely on talent. 3D probably could have convinced at least a dozen top players to replace rectOOOOr when he was struggling early in the CEVO season. But instead of switching up the rosters, they stuck with him. His play has improved, and 3D’s patience is being rewarded with a lot of wins.
It takes time to build a team. You can’t just throw five players together and have them all work out. Well, you can, but you’d need Ms. Cleo to help with the predictions. Otherwise it's just luck if a team of five (basically random) players all fit in well together. Hopefully this incarnation of verGe lasts a little longer, because they have the potential to be a great team – they just need to stick around long enough to be called that.
2. Hyper – Which leads me to another team: Hyper. I don’t understand what was wrong with the old lineup. They beat coL once in the Intel Invitational and in CEVO, and they barely lost in the Intel Finals … and all of a sudden that team isn’t good enough? Players need to be replaced?
Make no mistake, the guys they picked up are good players. But why even take the risk of things going south when it’s clear the team you have can compete with, and win against, the dominant team in Source? It’s one thing to be proactive about a known deficiency that teams are starting to exploit. In that case, you make some changes. It’s another thing to imagine a weakness and move to fix it when everything is running smoothly.
Of course, it’s just one tournament. It’s certainly possible this is just a small bump while they get used to the small roster adjustments. But I have a hard time imagining the team I saw in the Intel exhibition being beaten 10-4 by anybody, under any format, on any map. In this case, I don’t think any upgrade in their personnel was worth the risk of it all going south.
1. EG – Excuse me, waiter, I’d like one large helping of crow, please. Thanks. You know, can I get a large order of crow to go, as well? I think I might need it once I get home.
I hyped EG up as a CEVO darkhorse. I jumped on any success they had as a sign of things to come, and tried to ignore them playing two games and not doing particularly well. I was blinded by the talent. But at some point, if something fails to meet your expectations over and over again, it’s time to rethink your expectations. (Unless you’re George W. Bush, in which case you just hire people that agree with you.) EG hasn’t been horrible, but they certainly haven’t played up to my lofty opinions.
They have the talent to beat anybody, but they just don’t. They could tie Eximius or they could beat Hyper (both of which happened in the last week). At this point, I’m treating them like a Battlestar Galactica episode. Everything could turn out fine, or half the crew could end up being cylons. (Those crazy Battlestar writers will do anything … ANYTHING. I’m half-expecting them to write in Captain Picard and the Enterprise on the basis of it being an alternate reality.) The only thing I know about EG is that I can’t consider them an elite team until they choose a CS platform and stick with it.
If you noticed one thing about the results of this LAN, it should be the difference between the hyped, talented teams, and the solid, chemistry-driven teams. rSports, Check-Six, and Forbidden are teams that work well together. The first two have had a core of stable players, and Forbidden has the aforementioned members of the old verGe team in addition to two players that have played together before. Of course they’re all highly skilled players as well … you can’t just throw together a team of guys that aim like Elmer Fudd on drugs and expect to win. But I think the edge both of those teams have on most of their competition is their familiarity and organized play.
In other words, it’s like the difference between the Detroit Pistons and the New York Knicks. The Knicks have the most famous arena, play in the biggest city, and got the biggest names they could find in free agency. Then there’s the Pistons. They have a couple stars, they built their roster up slowly over time, and they win a lot of games based on the fundamentals: good defense, hustle, setting up teammates, etc. The winning teams from the Buy.com LAN aren’t going to blow you away with the name value of their players. There isn’t a person as famous as fRoD or notorious as Nightfall. But they’re going to show up to play, and now they have a chance to do it in the CGS Qualifier. That’s all that matters.
