The Crossfire Experience - Question 1

With the Crossfire Intel Challenge 7 behind us, we look back at the event in Enschede, the Netherlands with interesting stories from nine of the attending teams.

In the article, you can find out exactly how Reason Gaming, Team Impact, n!faculty, Rodcad Gaming, NCE.i3D, 1stCav, 4Sypher, Team Infused and H2k Gaming experienced their trip to Enschede, the Netherlands, what their weekend looked like and more.

- Could you tell us a little bit more about your trip, the time in the Netherlands and what your weekend looked like?
- Any crazy or funny things that happened during the event?
- The coolest person you met during the event?
- The best picture you’ve seen of the event?
- Looking back at the games played and your final standing, are you satisfied? - Anything that happened during matches that decided a game in your favor (or the opposite)?
- Who do you feel really performed far better than expected? And who did worse?
- Who would you nominate for tournament MVP (Most Valuable Player) and why?
- What are your overall thoughts on the event?

Could you tell us a little bit more about your trip, the time in the Netherlands and what your weekend looked like?

Tom "D1ablo" Newman (Reason Gaming): "Our day in Enchede was pretty hectic. The trip there was pretty simple and straightforward, but once we arrived it was the tightest LAN schedule I had ever experienced. A normal day for us would be, wake up at 7 am, shower etc, and get a taxi straight to the LAN event. Once we were there, me and Danny would normally go straight to the restaurant and get some of their gorgeous tomato soup to freshen us up for the day.

From then on it was pretty much set-up, play your games and wait around watching the other teams play. This would normally drag out until like 4 am, especially for us as all our games were close intense ones. It would then be rinse and repeat, after like 3 hours sleep a night!"

revoltz and Tom "D1ablo" Newman of Reason Gaming.

Amir "George" Hajar (Team Impact): "We took the plane from Milano to Weeze. At Weeze, Hertz had made us start laughing...they didn't accept my creditcard... lul, our trip full of coffeeshops and red lights over! After some quick research we found a taxi (in Italy they ask u something like 120 euros for 30 km....) and for 100 euros they left us at our wonderful hotel in Hengelo.

I booked that because it was near a:
1. Coffeeshop
2. Disco Pub
3. High School
4. Trainstation - a lot of girls going to University near the Wzzrd Center!!!

We loved to take that train, it was full of Dutch girls! It was funny, when the first night we opened the windows and we noticed it was snowing. 15 degrees in Milan, -3 in Holland, NICE! Skin only took a sweater ahha.

Example of a Team Impact CIC7 day:
6.00: dysan starts to fart.
6.01: We wake up because of Dysan's fart.
6.02: We almost die because of Dysan's smell and we go into coma.
8.00: We jump to the windows because until 7.55 dysan and skin didn't stop farting.
8.03: We are completly awake. We open the windows in Holland with this çéç°§*  weather!
8.20: We run to the trainstation in a river of blond hair girls and we just start to be happy. (This is the emotion on our face...I can't explain our lover part.)"

Max "mAx" Hartmann (n!faculty): "The time in the Netherlands was great. We had a lot of fun there, the people were really nice and it was a succesful weekend. Our days included playing till 03:15 in the morning, because of problems with the computers, but we enjoyed the matches against other good teams. The only thing what wasn't so good was to get up at about 10:00. It was too early, because we had a bootcamp during the week and had no sleep."

Jim "ownRrr" De Ronde (Rodcad Gaming): "I had to skip three lessons at school to get to the event, which would cost me 12 hours of detention, good start eh ;)? Friday around 2 pm Jente and Davy picked me up from my home, where we had some great tomato soup with some sandwiches. We installed the TomTom and started our trip in Jente’s brand new Volvo S40. Our trip went very smooth, hardly any slow traffic, so jente could "cruise". We arrived at 5pm. We met up with George, Will Nye, Camiel, jsmith, revoltz etc etc. We had some drinks and Will Nye KEPT asking me to roll him a joint.

We had to pick up Bart from the trainstation at around 8. Afterwards we had something to eat and just chilled some at Wzzrd. That night we went to our cabin and went for a sleep. Davy had put nuts on all of Gamelimited’s beds, which made them rage, and I was raging too because those nuts were mine.. (cba). We had some drinks and most of us got hammered, bartyez and some others of my team ended up stealing my tek9 shirt and burned it :S:S:S How cruel, the fuckers.

We had to get up at 7 that Saturday morning. First thing we did was go for a shower. When I wanted to go for a piss there was this huge mountain of shit in the toilet. I personally accuse either siddelz or paddeh. Man, that shit had to come from a huge stomach. After that we headed straight towards the Wzzrd. I actually tried to start Jente’s car, but I failed hard (I'M SO BAD AT CAR DRIVING :D:D).

We had to play SPEEDLINK on strike first and lost 13-9. Was a quite a close match in the beginning, but after that it things turned in their favor. Attack: 6-6, Defence: 3-7. Straight after we had to play YYT on stream, which was a cool match. It was quite close and ended 13-10 to YYT. It was on stream, so if any of you want to see it, go for it :D George had a sick ace.

Finally we had to play HWA on crash, in which we had 6 matchpoints at 12-5, but ended up winning 13-10. Afterwards we went for something to eat. We were driving for an hour to find a McDonalds and finally ended up getting a pizza at some shitty Turkish place haha. That night we had 4 crates of beer with Infused, DOK, TLR and some more teams I guess. I got fucked again and ended up trying to sleep with pukka and wannabe."

Rodcad Gaming in action at the Crossfire Intel Challenge 7.

Adam "vanner" Vanner (NCE.i3D): "After bootcamping on Thursday we went into the tournament and played against a competent sublime team, which, after a tricky start, we managed to win convincingly. We then played maniaX and won after another tricky start.

A few hours later we set up for 3 difficult games that would decide our group. We played Insenia first and after exchanging rounds in the 1st half we broke away decisively and won with relative ease once again. We then played against Team Thermaltake, who were pretty dominant online before the event. We started really well and were winning rounds for fun and should have really won 13-1 after choobie lost a 1v1 quite unluckily. I think it was 13-4 in the end, but it was so easy that I wonder what was going on forTeam Thermaltake.

We then played George and his Itallian Stallions on crossfire and after letting them take a big lead we pulled back really well on defence to claim a 13-8 win and take the group.

We then had well over 24 hours to waste and found out that we'd be playing Speedlink. I won't go into the game a lot, to put it this way: everything that could go wrong did. We had our scope with a terrible headset and we literally played like mongs on crash. We were shellshocked going into strike, and, although we did really well after being 9-1 down, we just never showed what we were capable of. The term bottled is a good phrase to explain what happened.

All credit to Speedlink, Reflexzr has turned an average German online team into a German powerhouse, who I think will do really well this summer. Twefoo is an incredible scope (and deagler!) and lopezz, patz and duffy are great players.

The rest of the tournament was fantastic to watch, I'm glad I bought a Jumbo popcorn for the Reason versus Power game to put it that way!"

Jakub "B33MN" Grotowski (1stCav): "We started our trip at something like 2 am, on Thursday. We were driving, driving, driving. When we got to Enschede, it was like 14 pm. We bought some joints, we came back to Dusseldorf, where we had a place to sleep, got stoned, and went to sleep. Nothing funny about it. The trip was definately a bit too long."

Joni "sarine" Laakso (4Sypher): "Well... Wednesday-Thursday night / morning was hell basically, drinking, smoking, no sleep at all, me passing out on the morning train on our way to the airport and having a minor concussion or something. The flight went ok, no problems there, but getting to Enschede was a different thing. The trains were late, trains broke down etc., so we were an hour or two late basically. We finally got to the lan center, sorted our hut, watched some games and started the same thing all over again, drinking and smoking :D That continued till Sunday and oh yeah, we played a couple of games of CoD4 there too."

Darren "wannabe" Borrow (Team Infused): "Wednesday – I left the house, went to the airport to meet Duffer, who has the brilliant idea of getting a bottle of vodka and drinking it in the bar.. not going to happen! We chilled around the airport for a while and attempted to bait Dallow into thinking duffer hadn't showed up. He didn't take the bait. Got the plane to Amsterdam, then had a HUGE trek around the airport to find our luggage, that airport is ridiculous! We met up with the rest of Reason and headed off to Enschede to meet the rest of the Infused guys. We chilled in the Wzzrd bar till like 1 in the morning and had to carry Rob home more or less, because he was so smashed: D.

Thursday – We chilled in the hotel for a while after getting up and getting showered… We then went to the event to bootcamp, chilled there for a while and played a load of games. They actually went really well. We played till like 11 pm and then started to have a few drinks. We went back to the cabin and chilled with the corgz lads and Myles told us some of his epic cb mix stories.. By this stage ono was freaking out at being cold turkey away from cb mixes :D.

Friday – We woke up, got showered and headed to the event.. That was a really stupid idea. We were at the event at like 10 am and our first game wasn't scheduled till like 19:45. We sat around the event all day, bored, spectating games and found out there was a 2 hour delay in the groupgames, so we didn't get to play until 22:15 or something. We played our first game vs gL and lost 13-9 I think; from there on we kind of knew we were out of the tournament. We then played 4Sypher and raped them like 13-3 on crash, which kind of got us feeling a bit more up beat.. That was the end of the games for the day, so we just went back to the cabin to chill and have a few drinks with Hostile Faction and Corgz.

Saturday – We woke up at like 7 am to get showered and stuff, knowing that we had to be at the event at like 8:30 am. We got to the event and had to instantly play fnatic. That didn’t go too great, I think we lost 13-8?? But it really should have been a much tighter game, we messed up a lot of rounds. After that we had to play Reason on crossfire, cheers timd!! We lost that game 13-7/8, I can't remember, but it didn't go too well either. We were officially out of the tournament, but still had one game left to play versus mspire on backlot! That game went pretty well and we won it comfortably in the end up, but still ended up fourth in the groups! All we could do now was sit around and support the other UK teams still left in the competition! I went to the supermarket with prekii, ownrr and niZ to get some beer for the cabins The beer is ridiculously priced in Holland, like 10 quid for 24 bottles, we got a shit load of beer for the cabin and went back to chill. We ended up having like 30 people in the cabin at one stage, which was pretty fun!!

Sunday – We had a nice lay on till like 11:00 and got up with corgz to go watch the semi finals and finals, hoping that Hostile Faction had gotten through, as they are really cool guys <3. Spent most of the day messing around in the Wzzrd centre, watching Duffer rip teams apart! Then Mr Vanner came up with the idea of popcorn and shiz for the finals and the next thing I know the whole centre is sitting around with it. It was a sick final and I was really hoping Reason could pull through, but it wasn't meant to be! After Reason lost we all said our goodbyes and went back to the cabin to chill and drink whatever booze we had left. Most of the guys left around 3:00 am to go catch a train for their flight. That was the end of this event, but I’m sure the next European LAN will just be as sick :D."

The Infused team posing for a picture.

Johan "miRACLE" Gärtner (H2k Gaming): "We had some problems with our trip to The Nederlands, nothing went as it should have. It all started with me and qLimAxz, who couldn't rent a car because you're not allowed to have spike tyres in Germany, while you need to have them in Sweden. So 2 days before the event we booked our flights to Dusseldorf and found a hotel. The next morning we took a train to Enschede, but we had to switch to 5 different trains. After that we reached the Wzzrd cafe, where we had a bootcamp, and afterwards we went to our house. It was a 25 minute drive to a small village called De Lutte. After a short sleep we took a quick shower, grabbed our stuff and went to the first Crossfire Challenge day. We had to play 3 matches, the first one was versus Dok Gaming, followed by a game against Hostile Faction and NCC eSports.  It went well with 3 wins in a row. When the competition was over for the day we took a cab to the house we rented and that is basically what our day looked like during the weekend. The trip home was a bit different. Mumma and myS took an early flight to Oslo, which was no problem for them, but me qLimAxz and VissEh took a later flight to Stockholm Skavsta. When we arrived at the airport they had shut it down, there was police everywhere and we had to wait outside for about one and a half hour. We'll plan our trip better next time for sure!"