All good things must come to an end, and so Hardfought LAN #6 must as well… the party ran a lil late to accomidate the final four tournament matches, I think we all got out of there at around 4pm CST. PowersGaming won the overall CS:S tournamant, with VisualGaming coming in a very close second, followed then by MinuteMen and then TEC. The tourney finale (both the winners bracket match and the overall winner match) was some of the closest match play I have ever seen. It started out like this… vG and PG play their upper bracket finals match on de_inferno, and go into overtime… seriously, it was decided by one round in the end, and vG came out on top to clinch the upper bracket top spot. MinuteMen battled it out with TEC on de_dust2 and won 16-7 to clinch the lower bracket title. They then faced PG to see who would take on vG for the overall spot in the tourney. PG came out with a strong victory against MinuteMen and then took a few minutes before playing their final overall match against vG. Powersgaming needed to defeat VisualGaming twice in order to become the overall winner. The final map was first played on de_dust2, in which PG came out on top 16-10. Because vG held the upper bracket title, they got to choose the next map, which was de_cbble. In the first half they came out with a strong show of force CT-side and won 13-2 against PG. At this point myself as I am sure a lot of other people were thinking ‘oh shit look at this, vG is gonna upset PG’. However, PG stepped it up for the final 2nd half and won 14-1, clinching the overall winners title for the Hardfought LAN #6 tournament. Like I said… some of the closest match play I have ever seen. We had close to 120 people in our IRC channel watching live via scorebot as well (sorry for the mod folks, too many chatters). Kudos to all the clans who played; over this weekend I saw a serious amount of great matches, and scrims as well.

Prize distribution – initially we were gonna go with a winner-take-all cash pot, but since that pot grew to $350, I decided to share the love some and split the cash winnings 200/100/50 among 1st/2nd/3rd place. All of the BFG Tech sponsored goodies were handed out as well (t-shirts for everyone and a cool-ass backback for the winning clan).

I am sooo tired, you have no idea ;-) Before I crash for good here tho, I just wanna put out a huge thank you to everyone – to all of the people who helped me out during the LAN to make sure things ran as smoothly as possible – SaGe^KS manning the front door and collecting everyones money and tracking our numbers, Jason Powers for resolving our electrical power issue for Tru-Gamerz building, G$, Blade and N2ivtix for getting the network setup and running flawlessly, Miklen for bringing a crimping tool and RJ45 headers so we could make all that extra CAT5 we needed, and to the numerous too-many-nams-to-mention folks who helped clean up, setup and tear down chairs and tables, run errands for me for things we had to have, and to SolarCurve from clan TAU and eLude from TEC for helping me correctly configure and maintain the dbl-elimination tourney brackets, and so on and so forth. This was Hardfoughts best LAN party to date in my opinion (even tho I was running around like a madman, hah) and it was great to see the turnout (right at 90 ppl, woo) and all of the games played, and reuniting of old friends and the making of new ones. Tru-Gamerz liked having us there, and we’re already making plans for next year’s LAN to take place the weekend before next years CPL summer tournament. We both learned a great deal from this LAN party, and the knowledge gained will make the next one even better.

That’s all I have for now gang. Gonna spend the 4th of July with family before I head back down to Dallas for the CPL summer event. More news to come (along with pics of the LAN) very soon. Until then…