Arriving back at lan on the friday morning ready to play we started to drink the rest of our crate and was ready to play our games. Knowing our team was a full masters line-up we didnt see anyone having any problems playing in the first couple of rounds. Voddy beat down and collected tears from the silver league players he faced and the rest of the team proceeded to do the same. All was fine until about 4pm. When we found out that 2 of our players (one being me) were to face off for a spot in the IPL4 qualifier and the other would have to face some loser bracket opponents to get there.
I lost and was sent to the losers bracket where i found out i needed one win to progress to sunday. I played my matches and qualified, just the thought of being able to play a pro was all i needed i made it through an extra round and then lost to a Protoss player "IndigoZerg".
This meant that the Saturday was free for the players that were knocked out. So we decided to hit the bar have a few drinks and catch some MLG games. Xivol one of our sc2 players still in the tournament decided to drink the most and suffer for it in the morning.
That night we managed to get a little more sleep and turn up fresh for another day of lan.
Saturday was exciting giving us the chance to spectate our fellow team member voddy in a gripping final which the final game of the series lasted for nearly 1 hour 30 minutes. After Infused.Gomas floated his buildings to the corner with i think 22 ravens.. Smack was exchanged and finnaly gomas GG'ed and left the game meaning Voddy had won the BYOC tournament and progressed to the next round as the number one seed from BYOC.
Some of our handy work with some paper and a pen!
So saturday night the pros started to arrive and the event started to become surreal for me. After watching so many SC2 tournaments in the last 6-9 months i have really grown to love some of the characters within the scene and being amongst them and able to talk to them was really an amazing expirience.
Heres some pictures of a few of them i managed to get on my phone!
Sorry about the quality but i took these on my phone and didnt have flash as i didnt wanna annoy the players
Meeting several of the players i managed to get a few autographs for the member of our team that didnt manage to make it to the event!
Sunday was an amazing day after playing SlayersRyung in the first round i was knocked into the lower bracket where i had to face Lau. I had a feeling Lau wasn't playing his best that weekend so i thought i might have a chance after a couple of close games i lost but wasn't to bothered as it meant i was able to get into fan mode for the major tournament later on and enjoy watching some of the best players play.
Midway through the day i was sat watching Ryung and tails and lilsusie came and sat next to me watching him. At first i was worried what to say to the Korean player but after a while me and him started to talk and he could understand English quite well, even after lilsusie explained to me that before this weekend he couldn't understand any Enligsh. Both Koreans were really nice and always smiling the whole event. I even remember at one point tails had lost in the winner bracket but came running over to Ryung with a massive smile on his face. Kinda uplifted a few peoples spirit that day.
Another funny story was that after tails was knocked into lower bracket Ryung decided to troll him and tell him that the bull ride kinda stall behind him would give Tails a free dinner if he managed to stay on over 20 seconds. Not until after did Ryung tell him that he was joking and just wanted to see him fall off
After a stressful day of Starcraft for the pros and watching a shaky Stephano take the finals against tails we decided to hit the bar where we met TotalBiscuit. Having met him before at ECL we talked for a while at the bar, he ordered six shots of Malibu and turned around to me and Xivol and offered us 1 each. Then i asked if he needed a hand carrying the rest and he asked me to take them to the other pro players and ask who wanted them.. I handed one to Demuslim and Stephano. Then dApollo shouted for the last and i gave it to him. Several minutes later dApollo was giving the drink to MVPTails and telling him it tasted nice. A long night was ahead with watching the finals on the side stage and seeing Tails get progressively worse over the night.. The finals finished the pros headed back to their rooms and we headed back to enjoy the last night of LAN.
One final thing id like to put across is the respect i personally have for TotalBiscuit and i'm sure many of my team agree. Not just because of the free drink (that did help) But his work he does for the scene and also the interest he has in making the UK scene one of the biggest e-sports scenes in the world.. We have along way to go but with people like TB and Apollo fronting this i'm sure its just a matter of time
Sorry about my bad English and hope to see you all at I45.
<3
As a final note me and ViTal did some short interviews with some players it was kinda a test for future events we just wanted some examples that we could work upon.. Ill link here but they were just testers.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/tHbZyz3t6pI
http://www.youtube.com/embed/4oTDxXs-Cuw
Thanks to the guys who took time to do these interviews
Also really big thanks to Team eNigma! Lots of good stuff to come from us guys and hopefully alot of good sc2 players will emerge here
www.team-enigma.co.uk
Also the amazing admins at the event they really did make it run smooth after meeting Bakor at ECL and I44 hes a really sound guy and tbh more events need to hire him, any problems this guy was on it and also i hear that all the pros didn't have any problems with anything admin related at the event (He even spent his lunch break moving computers) Much love..
KarMa
Team eNigma