Games started fairly late today. The UT2004 tournament only kicked off after the Forrest-Lauke game at 14.00. The game itself was quite nice I have to say. Rankin was very tight for a long period of time but everything fell apart for the Italian after Lauke's first frag. From then on Forrest seemed completely knocked off balance and could not really get a grip until the end of the second map. He did not look too happy, especially that he'll have a real tough game against schnig for second place in the group (that is if you disregard infinite as a serious contender).

Th0r's group started off with a huge, huge upset. Spawn from aT who came as a replacement for Shaggy ("Oh I didnt know it was on") beat th0r 2-0 and then beat zulg 2-1 earning himself a first place finish in the group. After that zulg lost to th0r (the man's aim was unbelievable at times). In the other group the Burnie was the man. As I mentioned before, the guy's aim is unbelievably solid. He beat everyone in straight games. Second place fell to Varagh who managed to take it at the cost of the high seeded stryfe.

The Quake 3 tournament is proceeding without any surprises whatsoever so basically we are waiting for the second group stage. There we'll see two of the giants facing each other for the better spot in the semi final. It has to be said, though, that Jay from the UK gave fooki a real scare on DM6, though. In the other group America is rampaging.

I gathered some PainKiller impressions from the players. Fatal1ty was struggling against Zen (he won 2-1). The players from Europe are not really impressed by his play. Some claim that he's not going to go past the first knockout stage. Because he was all hidden in the hotel room practicing with Zen all the time I suspect that he might be actually doing this on purpose. We will just have to see I guess. On another note, SteLam is simply on fire and he's getting unbelievably high scores vs everyone on his best maps. Vo0 is looking very impressive as well and not many people are that impressed by stermy actually. What annoys me about PK is that it's very hard to spectate and you can't really see who's playing on the plasma screens.

I have interviewed Cooller for ESReality Uncut 2, I think it turned out quite well. Straight after that we went to see the stage match between the US and France. Wheat and Geist were commentating it from right under the stage instead of from the booth this time. The show was quite nice I guess, just a shame that it's only two or three maps a game. One would wish for more Quake. After the players introduction a map was drawn and then the team captains had 20 seconds to make a choice on who to field on the map. The first game was on cpm1a between linkin and ZeRo4 and the American hardly had any problems winning this. He showed some awesome Quake as well (like a pummel-rail combo or a few airrockets). Then we had a battle of two captains: St_Germain and czm. I have to say... czm is awesome. He times four items perfectly and at the same time the man hits such rails that the audience were astounded. A good win for the US, no problems at all. On Thursday we have some more group games and we will see Russia and Belarus in play. Goodie.

In the evening half of the people went playing poker and the other half just hung out in front of the hotel. Some drunk WC3 mTw guy came into socrates' room and pissed all over the bathroom floor and later made quite a mess of himself outside, puking about 2345256 times. Jay was very joyful about that. All the evenings are pretty much similar here. We hang out and talk, whoever gets to play the following day goes to sleep earlier and that's that.

At this point I have to apologise for the lack of interviews and journals from our VIPs but... The car accident thwarted our efforts a lot. zr0 left his notebook with if-22 in the hospital so the poor lad would not get bored so much. (Lemmy will be here at about noon on Thursday and he decided he would play with a broken finger.) Once we get the notebook back we should be getting good interviews and updates. The press area is completely closed for anyone else but the press and staff. We tried sneaking people in but they wouldn't let us. Moreover, the press area is closed very shortly after the evening stage game so it's hardly possible to do decent updates in the evening. The notebook will be a blessing. Expect a bigger ZeRo4 interview and a little bit more good stuff soon.

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