ESEA and PureTrak are teaming up to give away $3,000 to the top CS:Source Deathmatch players out there. Everyone that participates and logs 250 frags will also receive a $5 coupon off of PureTrak’s Talent or Stealth mouse pads and a free two week trial to ESEA’s Premium service. The $3,000 will be split amongst the top 64 fraggers between now and November 21st.

The event is completely free to play and all CSS DM servers are protected by ESEA’s industry leading anti-cheat Client. For more information visit www.ESEA.net/challenge.

Live coverage at events is a crucial part in the growth of eSports. I think the reason why the CPL was so successful when it was in its prime was due to the excellent coverage they had of their events. They had the kind of coverage that made you so badly want to be at the actual event. I remember being 15 years old watching CPL, seeing teams like 3D and SK battle it out, and thinking, "Wow, that would be crazy cool if that was me."

I've always wanted to try my hand at live casting, for fun more than anything, but also to play some role in helping our community grow. After having met BobWeaver at LANchamp Chicago, I approached him last week with the idea to let me cast LANchamp LA. He was onboard right away; I booked my flight to LA, and started preparation.

Having never done anything like this in the past, I had no idea what to expect. I have three years of experience doing demo commentaries for the site, but I've never done anything live before. I knew going in to the event that this was going to be a learning experience, which it definitely was.

There were quite of few things that could and will be improved on for future events. I am well aware of the low-quality of the stream and the annoying advertisements. This is because I used the free livestream streaming platform that held me to those limitations - I wasn't ready to spend the money on a better solution (on top of all my travel expenses) until I knew if this is something I wanted to become more serious about. However, given my limited time and money resources, I think the quality of the video stream itself was still acceptable.

Other things like problems with my microphone volume and outside noise should be easy to fix in the future. Some people were annoyed by constant switching of players and scoreboard tapping. As a caster however, this is something I had to do. In a typical cast, you have casters and directors. Casters do the talking and directors direct the video so that it is a smooth viewing experience. I was doing both jobs at once, which isn't ideal, but again, the lack of preparation time and personnel lead to me having to do this.

As for my casting itself, I had no idea if I would even be worth listening to. I arrived late at the event, and my first cast involved hopping in to a server mid-match after having traveled for 16+ hours on 3 hours of sleep. It took me a few rounds, but I was eventually able to get in a rhythm, and by the end of the event I felt really comfortable doing this live. Given my background is in strategy commentaries, I tried to mix in some strategic advice here and there, but stuck mostly to play-by-play calling. I learned more throughout the day, and I will analyze the recordings from the event to pick up on mistakes and things I can improve on, but overall it exceeded my expectations. Having LanDodger there with me was a huge help and I hope he will be there with me at future events. It's very nice to have someone to bounce things off of and it felt like he complimented everything perfectly.

I did this event primarily for fun; I had no idea what to expect. More than anybody, I know how many things could have been improved. However, for having only a week to put this together by myself, I think it turned out well and am excited to build off this at future events.

Due to weather, I'm stuck in Detroit after missing my connecting flight to Los Angeles. The earliest I will be able to get to the LAN center tomorrow is about 4pm PDT (6 hours after the event is to begin).

While this puts a damper on what I had planned, hopefully things will still work out and there will be good coverage of the event.

Also, a vending machine just ate my dollar. And there is nothing I can do about it.

edit: My dad is awesome and has gotten me a slightly earlier flight. Hopefully I'll be to the LAN center by 1 PDT.

I will be out in LA to provide live video coverage of the LANchamp Finals in LA on Saturday, June 5. You will likely be able to view the stream here or over at www.lanchamp.com.

It is an all day event, so mark your calendars. This should be an exciting event, and my first ever experience giving live commentaries!

I graduated from college this last week. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about lessons that I’ve learned during my college career, and consequently my gaming career. I thought I’d share one tidbit of knowledge (aka incoherent rambling) that I’ve picked up along the way.

After you graduate from college, you will go through a period of being heavily scrutinized. If you are going to grad school, you’ll have to get letters of recommendation, write purpose statements, and have your transcripts reviewed by admissions officers. If you are going in to the job market, you will be judged by your resume, assessed against your peers, and evaluated in interviews. All your friends and parents will be asking you: what’s the next step in your life?

As you get older, you will be subject to people who will evaluate you. There will be people who criticize you, patronize you, and who generally just don’t think much of you. That’s just a part of life. People have and always will prejudge you.

This happens in the CS community all the time – players labeling other players as bad, incompetent, or insisting that others cheat. And this isn’t only common among lower and mid tier players, but also among the elite. In fact, I would argue that it is even more common among the elite.

I have no doubt that you reading this have at one time been labeled either a bad player or a cheater. I have been – everybody has. There were many times while playing competitively where expectations for me and my team had sunk relatively low. And undoubtedly there will be times while you are playing where others will have low expectations of you. But rather than letting this get you down, use this as an opportunity to surpass expectations and blow everyone away.

One of my greatest moments as a CS player came out of a period of low expectations:

In October 2005, my team attended DigitalLife in New York. Heading in to this tournament, there were a lot of things working against us. We had just come out of a dreadful placing at Summer CPL (25th-32nd). We had just been moved down in CAL because paradox had been banned for “cheating”. We were a CAL-Open team competing in a tournament with 6+ CAL-Invite teams. Out of the 12 teams at the event, we were seeded 10th. Needless to say, expectations were low.

However, we weren’t going to let that stop us from achieving our goals. In fact, we embraced that adversity and used it to our advantage. We worked our tails off. And when we won the event, it could not have felt more rewarding. We had blown everyone away. We had literally come out of nowhere to knock off the best in the world.

When I played competitively, I was never one to patronize another player or team. Why? Simple – because above all else, I was a competitor.

As a competitor, my ultimate goal is to win. If I were to patronize another player I would be doing myself a disservice as a competitor by providing that player extra motivation to work harder to beat me. If my ultimate goal as a competitor is to win, why in the world would I do that?

Let this be a lesson, not only when you are aspiring to become a better CS player, but in all aspects of life. Don’t let adversity exert a negative effect on you. Instead, embrace it. Leverage it. Use it to achieve excellence.

My first day of summer classes ended about 30 mins ago and for the first day, it was at least somewhat entertaining. I'm in my second trimester of nursing school right now which I am enjoying except for the studying of course. Good news on the CS:S front as well, we have picked up Sam "devour" Chamma for the zomblerz and we have been absolutely playing our tails off the past week. We even played on Friday and Saturday which is abnormal for us, or for any team really, but we've got catching up to do since we have a new player and that's just what it takes to be a pro team in our situation. We lost a super close match to x3o last night in double overtime on de_inferno. There were just a ton of rounds that could have gone our way but overall I am really pleased with our play since we have Sam now.

I'm also trying to get back into running again. In high school I was in cross country running and while I was never the fastest I used to be able to run 3 or 4 miles at a time. So I set out today and just got absolutely plowed by running. I have a feeling it's going to take me a long time to get back into it but I'm going to try to be as dedicated as possible. I feel like being in better shape will also improve my reactions some and help my CS:S game as well as my general health of course so it just makes sense. Thanks again for all the support we've received here on the site as well, it's very encouraging (: Until next time guys!

Hey guys, Griff here again talking to you this time from sunny Cancun, Mexico ! I have been down in here in Mexico on vacation since Monday and I have really been having a blast and a much needed break. The last few days I have been soaking up some sun and waves and relaxing to the max. I look foward to coming back and working with you guys some more and for those of you who have messaged me on IRC, I will respond as soon as I get home if my computer is still running. I should be home late Saturday night so if I don't respond by Sunday just message me again. The Coca-Cola here in Mexico is just amazing by the way, I wish I could get more of it up in Wisconsin because it just tastes so much better! If you like Coca-Cola don't ever pass up the chance to try some from down here.

I am also pleased that the zomblerz have been doing well since my absence and I am looking foward to getting back to playing as soon as I come back. I am sure that you will be hearing about our new 5th player who I am excited about getting on board. Once everything gets finalized I will be talking some about that as well!

Hey guys! Griff here again comin' at you at 4:08 AM central standard time. You might be asking yourself "Why is Griff up so late if he has work at 7:30 AM ?" I am up at this hour because I wanted to make sure that you guys got some content update before the weekend hit. I've put up a brand new video article on some defensive CT setups at the A bombsite on de_inferno that I made a couple of days ago. This is the first video I have encoded for the site, and while Juan is a superb teacher (even making a commentary on how to encode commentaries for me), sometimes the world of computers just won't give you an inch. I've been rendering, encoding, and re-encoding this video since 7:00 PM. I've installed enough shady video editing programs that i'll be surprised if this blog isn't infected with malware. However, through all of this, I've got the video up on the site for you guys to check out. When I get home tonight I'm going to finish encoding a video commentary by Pex from x3o and will have that up in no time. I'm also really thrilled with the positive feedback the site has received in the last few weeks so let's keep that energy up moving foward. I'll go ahead and give you guys a taste of what's coming up in the weeks ahead so you can prepare your minds for some knowledge.

Also, the zomblerz have started out ESEA-invite at 1-1 which I am pretty pleased with, our next matches are on de_nuke (my fav. map) vs. HRG and Netcode

Coming Soon:

x3o|pex vs i7 video commentary

XL-bet Lokke video article on "the euro style"

video commentary from chewbacca