Thursday:
We left for the airport around 5 pm. We had to be there 6pm (2 hours before the flight). The flight went smoothly or we had some turbulence but nothing to worry about. 1 Hour and 15 minutes later we landed in France, and we went for our hotel and checked Paris out before we went to bed.

Friday:
The day after we decided to get up early just to see Paris, we saw the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame etc. and it was really fun, and as you may know, the social part is extremely important for us, so it was absolutely perfect just to take a day off and chill the day before it all started.
Later on that night we watched some demos with Evil Genius and e-STRO

Saturday:
Saturday it all started, we woke up pretty early, and me even earlier than the others, because I was so stupid the day before that I forgot my id, so I couldn’t check in, they said: Come tomorrow morning before 8.00 Am and check in otherwise you guys are in big problems.

Guddo woke me up and we went to the event to get my badge, after that we went into the tournament area where we met SK’s owner The_Slash, guddo talked to him for 5 minutes before I finally could set my stuff up and start playing.

30 minutes later the others from my team arrived with some French baguettes, we started talking about the teams in our group. We were facing the French team Get2gev, I personally don’t know much about them, but one thing I do know is that you don’t underestimate a French team in France, you never know what they a cable of.

We didn’t, and I felt we got the 16 rounds easy, and after that we still took the game serious, but they just kept winning rounds against us, and we only managed to win 16-14.

The next match was against the Dutch team DCC-gaming, who played 15-15 with Evil Genius, we know that Holland has some great players so we didn’t underestimate them either. Hmm, I actually don’t think we underestimate people at all after our big failure later on this year against the Greek team Vatos Locos :D. We won the match and our biggest opponents in our group were waiting, e-STRO.

We played de_inferno in the first two matches, and we somehow also played inferno in the third map against the Koreans. We knew they were really good on inferno, but we also felt it was our map, we got a bad start but kind of found ourselves before it was too late. We started playing our A-game, and much of the time I felt we were the better team, but we played 15-15 which was okay for us.

What we needed to finish first in our group was a big win against the Americans, and we kind of thought they were a tough nut to crack, we watched them play at Kode5 and they managed to beat fnatic and tie against Virtus pro if I remember correctly. So we feared them I must say, but we simply just ran over them, 16-2 and the match was over, we finished 1st in Group C.

We went on a café just to chill from all the noise at the tournament area, and suddenly guddo called me and said we were facing Team Alternate in the quarter-final and we were meeting either emulate or roccat in the semi-final. I kind of teased the others after the call, by just sitting and smiling to the others, and they were like: “C’mon tell us!!”

We watched a demo with Team Alternate against Mousesports on inferno, we knew that Alternate liked inferno but we like the map as well; And even though CHEF-KOCH were absolutely crazy in that match against mousesports, we decided to go after it. Inferno it was.

We started out well as T on inferno by leading 9-6 before changing to CT. We continued our play and for the first time in the tournament I felt we starting playing like we did in Moscow, Russia.

We won 16-6 and roccat was waiting the next day after winning 16-3 against emulate.

Sunday:
We watched some demos with roccat, we knew it was going to be the first time we weren’t gonna play inferno the entire tournament, so we were kind of nervous with the fact that we haven’t played any other map the whole tournament.

Roccat instantly removed Inferno against us, and we kind of wanted to play train against them so we took a chance and removed dust2 and nuke so they could chose between Tuscan and train, and they picked train.

We started out as T and we played bad, we won the pistol round and was leading 3-0, but then they starting winning, and after 15 minutes of play they were leading like 9-4 if I remember correctly. We had an eco where we just idled and talked about what we were doing wrong, it helped us a lot and we got a round and went to the CT side behind 5-10, which was good for us.

And from there things went our way, we won the pistol round and the 4th round and we stopped every attack they made, we simply just knew how they were playing, and ave read them almost every round. We won 11-0 and won the match 16-10 and we were in the final!!

Final was waiting in the final against us, and we decided we wanted to play train against them, we knew they hated dust2 or atleast they didn’t like the map, but somehow they fooled us and they were looking forward to play dust2 against us.

We talked about what maps we were going to remove, and before the tournament we knew that you could remove two maps, so we didn’t practice dust2 and Tuscan for 3 weeks, and fnatic knew that and we thought fnatic wanted to play train against us.

So this is how we made the biggest “mistake” ever in 2008.

ave vs. carn

ave: We are going to remove de_train
Carn: Okay, we are gonna remove inferno and nuke
ave: ?
zonic: ?!??!
carn: :)
ave: what are we gonna do
zonic: we fucked up :/
carn: :)
ave: yeah, wanna play Tuscan?
zonic: ehm no?
ave: Okay let’s play dust2
carn: :)

Dust2 it was, we didn’t practice the map at all for 3 weeks and we went to the toilet where mJe and Sunde were out teaching some friends how to “swim” :D Anyways the funny part is that we went out there and we said: “Guy’s we are playing dust2” and then you could here like two guys in the toilet
“Wtf?!?!” “how the hell is that possibly”

We admitted our mistake, but then we started talking about we kind of like to play the map, but just feel more confident on the other maps. We talked through the tactics, and went back to the stage.

We started out winning the pistol round, and the 4th round and you guys know the rest, we haven’t played such a good T before, and with incredible read by ave and some amazing AWP shots through the gate in the middle by Sunde we were leading 13-0 before fnatic stopped our attack.

13-2, and we joined the CT side, we lost the gunround and and mJe tk’ed in the eco so we were forced to have one more eco. We won the first buyround and the next after that and the match were over after 5 minutes.
GG!

After we got our prize on the stage and took some photos etc we went to the press room to answer all the questions from the journalists. After that we went to the hotel and took a shower before we went out to eat in Paris, we decided to go out and celebrate, but whiMp and ave decided to wear knickers and shorts, and a huge guard denied their clothes so people split up and some of us went back and went to bed etc. no big a deal, because our flight was leaving at 7:00 AM the next day (Good job guddo)

The end.