Power Gaming

This weekend our CounterStrike: Source team is attending Copenhagen Games in Denmark, where they are competing for a share of €6716 in prize money at the first major CSS event this year.

They are joined at the event by both Ben Woodward and Luke Cotton, and we will be bringing you full coverage of the event here on our new website! The event begins on Friday April 2nd, with our first game at 19.00 local time against GET4 Gaming, with the final taking place on Saturday night.

Our team have been seeded 4th for the event, which has a number of top teams in attendance, including Reason Gaming, who we faced in the final at Multiplay i38; The Imperial, who we faced at Dreamhack; and both the German side Alternate and the Australian Archaic eSports who have been bootcamping together for the past 2 weeks. We have been bootcamping for the past 2 days at Gamerbase in Reading, where despite some hardware issues we have had some invaluable practise due to a couple of our players having internet problems at home. We have been drawn in group D alongside the Italian team OX.enermax, and the local Danish teams GET4 Gaing, Numsepatrujlen and GamingServer.dk.

Sam "RattlesnK" Gawn said the following ahead of the event:
"Although we haven't been a team for very long with our bootcamp and practise online we've gone over most of our tactics and strats for this event so compared to other teams we'll be well prepared. The only thing that could let us down is our chemistry as we haven't had much playing time together but anything other than a victory would a disappointment with the players that we've got in our team."

As well as full coverage on our website, you can expect regular twitter updates, videos over on our youtube channel and we will be blogging from the event.

Power Gaming CSS in Copenhagen are:
Sam "RattlesnK" Gawn
George "HudzG" Hoskins
Henry "HenryG" Greer
Dan "Re1ease" Mullan
James "wilzOOO" Wilson

Playoffs:
LB Final: Power Gaming [13-16] Reason - de_dust2
WB Final: Power Gaming [3-16] Imperial - de_tuscan
WB Semi-Final: Power Gaming [16-11] Reason - de_dust2
WB Quarter Final: Power Gaming [16-6] Ox-Gaming - de_dust2
WB Round 1: Power Gaming [16-9] SpeedGaming - de_nuke

Group D:
Power Gaming [26-4] GET4 Gaming - de_dust2
Power Gaming [30-0] Numsepatrujlen  - de_nuke
Power Gaming [29-1] GamingServer.dk - de_train
Power Gaming [18-12] OX.ENERMAX - de_tuscan

Luke's Blog:

Thursday:
After going back home last weekend, I only had to make the hour's journey to Heathrow this morning for our flight to Copenhagen. Soon after I arrived there at 12.30 George, Henry, Sam and Dan arrived at the airport and we checked them in and dropped off our bags. We got through security without any problems, changed some money and went to look for some food. The new terminal 5 building didn't have much to offer in that regard, with the few places there being packed, so we just grabbed a sandwich, before some of the guys decided to go and buy some extortionately priced swimming shorts for the hotel pool. We boarded the plane but had some delays taking off, and after a bumpy flight we landed in Denmark 5 minutes early. When we got to the hotel we were struck by its grandeur. The view from the room is insane, can almost see Sweden! The guys got changed into their swim stuff before finding out the pool was closed so decided to get some food instead. Ben and I decided to head into Copenhagen and wandered around trying to find somewhere which wasn't ridiculously expensive and eventually settled on this one restaurant which served a really good pesto & chicken pasta thing. After chatting with the guys who were chilling in their rooms we decided to head to the casino downstairs (the only casino in Copenhagen). We hung around their for an hour and ended up making about 500DKK each on roulette and the slot machines we decided to call it a night, so I'm now finishing off day one of my blog! I'll be updating it throughout the weekend so make sure you check back!

Friday:
Well, the idea was to go to bed after writing last night's blog, however Ben then had a craving for a cigarette so rather than stand outside we went back into the casino, where we quickly blew the evening's profit - expensive cigarette! We set off to the event about 12, with the highlight of the journey being a guy leaning out of his car window, wearing a pig mask drinking champagne, unfortunately he drove off too quickly for us to be able to get a video. When we got to the event we picked up our PCs, which for once don't seem to have any problems and just played deathmatch for most of the afternoon, before playing some practise games with Alternate. One quite possibly major problem that we did find out was the sun coming through the windows onto our monitors, rendering most of us blind, but hopefuly that will be sorted tomorrow. The groupstage games went without many problems and were over quite quickly, with us destroying 3 Danish teams whilst only dropping 4 rounds in the process, in between games Ben and myself played some poker with his old friend Nicholas Estrup, the guys from XLBet and a few others, before we faced OX Gaming in our final game at midnight. We took an 11-4 first half lead and soon made it to 15 rounds before final round syndrome hit and we took a long time to finish the game off, then it was back to the hotel and to bed.

Saturday:
An early start today, with us leaving early for the venue to warm up for our first game at 11.00 against SpeedGaming. Playing nuke we took a 12-3 half time lead as CT, but gave away a few too many T rounds for us to be happy with our performance, but a victory is a victory. I went over to try to find the Ox-Gaming manager as they owe us some CPUs from an online cup they hosted, but they were playing Archaic and had taken a 13-2 lead. Archaic mounted a comeback, but at 15-12 it was a 1v1, one of the Ox players rested his head on the table, before deciding to get up and leave his seat. As soon as his teammate made the final frag, he flung himself onto his teammates, nearly flooring a group of spectators. We beat Ox comfortably soon after on dust2, never really having any problems, before a long break before the Reason game meant that Ben and myself could go and get some lunch, finding a nice little cafe just down the road. We came back just before we were about to kick off against Reason, and after winning the knife we started off as terrorist. My memory of the game is a little hazy, but we were playing strongly and never really looked like losing. That was the complete opposite off The Imperial game who we faced on tuscan, a map we've played poorly against them on before. After losing the pistol we never threatenned them and everything we were doing seemed to go wrong and we suffered a heavy defeat, so we fell down to the lower bracket. Myself and Ben had a few meetings whilst the players worked on tactics for the Reason game. This kicked off a few hours later, and again we won the pistol round. You should watch this video for some laughs, it sums up our team quite well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgS3Dyv3Mns :) Unfortunately we couldn't repeat our performance, and after they took the first 4 rounds we had no momentum. A sick 3 man clutch from Re1ease brought the game back and we rallied, but we weren't able to do enough to take victory and went down 16-13, a shame as we outclassed them earlier in the day and were confident of doing it again. We had to wait around to get our prize money for quite a while, so a few of our guys watched a stream of the boxing whilst HenryG joined the Aussies from Archaic who'd been drinking most of the afternoon. Myself and Ben had a few beers with Kim from SteelSeries and a Danish CS player whose name I can't remember who used to play for SoA, who destroyed us at table football. We were going to go to Guddo from mTw's birthday party but after having to wait around for so long we decided just to go back to the hotel and chill. Henry went out with the Australians and when he got back to the hotel in the very early hours, he found the door unlocked, but on the chain, which Dan had left on as he "didn't want to lock Henry out" - pretty funny!

Sunday:
We got up just before midday to check the guys out who were flying home that day, and after we waited around with them for an hour or so we were going to go for a swim, however we then discovered that the hotel had decided to pre-auth Ben's card despite him having already paid for the hotel, so we had the enjoyment of trying to get some money for the rest of the weekend, so we had to head into town to find an ATM. We ended up eating in an Irish Pub and watching the football after working out the bus route into town. We got back early in the evening and went to the casino to play some poker, which wasn't very sucessful. We sat down with about £120 each playing £3.50/£3.50. In the 2nd hand Ben got dealt pocket kings and raised pre-flop to a few callers, the board came low, someone made a small raise and he shoved, and some fish called with an up and down straight draw. Obviously they hit and that set the tone for the evening which was pretty disappointing. He reloaded and I added again to my stack, and after 4 hours I left with 40dkk profit, about £5, not something I'll be in a hurry to do again. We did some work back at the hotel to prepare for and follow up on some meetings, whilst finishing off the website.

Monday:
We decided to have a lie-in today after our late night working before, but we were then woken by the maid phoning our room asking if we wanted it to be cleaned despite having a do not disturb sign on the door, because that's an invitation for them to telephone us, right? :s We decided to go to Malmo in the afternoon for a few hours so we could eat lunch/dinner which means that's another country I can tick off my list of places to visit as the Swimming Pool was closed.

Tuesday:
Not content with phoning us yesterday, this morning a random man walked into our room, not once, but twice... we got a late check-out so we caught the metro and the bus to the SteelSeries office which is in a residential area on the other side of the city for a meeting and lunch with them which went well! Then we headed back to the hotel, picked up our stuff and made our way to the airport. I'm now sitting on the place finishing this blog - if you'd like to leave any comments they're most welcome as I'll be blogging again from Copenhagen later this month when I go there with the COD4 team for the SteelSeries Esport Challenge!