Our final standing was 5th place, with 4 wins and 4 losses. Results were as follows:
4:0 win vs pidar
2:4 loss vs h2k
4:0 win vs auth
4:2 win vs diversus
4:0 win vs 8bits
0:4 loss vs Mamut
0:4 loss vs ButtonBashers
2:4 loss vs h2k
We began the tournament with
Viax as our 6th player, and when we began were at the very top of our game, arguably one of the better teams in the game. We went into our first game unsure of what to expect with pidar being a new team, but went through the game with a pretty easy win. This set us on good grounds for the rest of the cup, with a win against a strong team, but at this point we began trialling for a new 6th to replace Viax for lan. This cut us short of practice unfortunately, but after a tight game with h2k we lost 2:4 and got set back a little in the group stages. After that game, we'd decided on joop as our new 6th for LAN.
Our next 3 games vs auth, diversus and 8bits were generally comfortable wins, though a map loss to diversus was a bit of a slap in the face. After bringing in
joop, he hadn't quite settled yet at this point, so we were still relatively inconsistent, but went into our next game with confidence. After 8bits we faced our final opponent of the group stages, Mamut. Mamut were at this point considered the strongest team in the game, but we gave it our best, which wasn't much with 
rahul's lag rendering him incapable of using vent. Despite getting completely trashed by 
Night and co., we still qualified for the group stages. Coming out of the group in 3rd place (Mamut 1st and h2k 2nd), left us against ButtonBashers, who we'd been beating in practice games, but knew they had tricks up their sleeves. When the night of the official came, BB brought in 
Matias and gave themselves a fantastic performance boost and also beat us comfortably. This knocked us down into the loser bracket where the pressure was really on.
Our next and final game was versus h2k. We went into the game confident, having pulled ourselves together since our group stage loss to them. Our first map was incredibly close, though a loss on sw_goldrush. We went into our second map, supply, with spirits still high and set a very fast time of 7 minutes on attack and held it comfortably. After a great performance on supply, we were motivated for our decider, and then they chose oasis. Removed many seasons ago for being a dire map, ET masters chose to reintroduce the map for what i can only assume to be nostalgic reasons, or a joke. Regardless, we gave it our best shot but lost, which i feel was due to their stronger individual performance on the map, and their prior preparation on it. I would probably say coming out of the ET Masters tournament in 5th place is where we expected to be, so we're unsatisfied in the fact that we haven't exceeded ourselves. Would it have been a different tournament if oasis wasn't in the map pool? Would we have been a stronger team if we didn't have to change players? Would i be an elf if my ears were more pointy? Who knows, we tried.
Posted by: rahul at 25 April 2009 14:31, viewed 499 times
essAkz on 26-04-2009 21:54
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