AEF: Preview - Main Contenders - Imperial eSports

Geir "gizzor" Wivelstad
Robin "robonz" Bakken
David "ono" McConnell
Jasko "cozje" Berbic
Kévin "FRENCHY" Héraudet


A team of true melting pot style, Imperial eSports have one of the most difficult line-ups in terms of logistics, but still have fought off most of the critics by delivering strong and upsetting results at earlier events. Most of you will have remembered their breakthrough performance at the Crossfire Intel Challenge 7 where they were seeded as they were beaten quite convincingly in the Seeding tournament just a couple of weeks earlier by NCE.I3D. During their group stage, they seemed unstoppable and delivered blow after blow to their four opponents and easily advanced through to the play-offs. While doing so, they were to face off against Team-Dignitas, who had been tipped as one of the outsiders to take a win there, and simply seemed to play more coherent and more organized than the Brits, giving them their biggest upset win of the tournament. Everything past this point would only be considered a bonus for the European mixed team. Quite unfortunately, they immediately met up with FnaticMSI in the play-offs and had to concede a loss. However, they did take a map from the Call of Duty 4 champions and would walk away from the event with their heads held high. This was a first and foremost performance by what many deemed as just your average mix team and this gave the team a boost and feeling as if they still had plenty of room to grow.

The months passed and they kept on playing, but unfortunately, were faced with problems somewhere around May. This dramatically affected the team's activity and when Dan "VAE" Ball announced afterwards that he would be unable to attend the Antwerp Esports Festival due to unforeseen commitments, the team had not been having a lot of practice and needed to find a new player to still try and do as well as possible. Picking up former TCM-Gaming player, Kévin "FRENCHY" Héraudet is definitely a plus in my eyes, as he has been one of the better players in the French scene in the last 6 to 9 months. However, the French are not known for the exquisite foreign language skills and therefore it will be interesting to see how well Imperial's ingame communication is going to be when it really matters.

The way this team is built up, they should be considered as a strong and capable opponent by all of the top teams, they should not be underestimated in any case. But, and this is a big one, they have not been able to really play a lot with many of the team's players out on holiday during June and July, they have only been able to put in two weeks' worth of practice with a completely new player. This will dramatically decrease their odds of doing better than a top 8 finish, yet teams who practise less have been known to do better on LAN, but that will always be a long-shot guess and will involve a lot of luck. Even though, I like this team, I think this is not their event. But I could be wrong, as I often am.