by Sal "Volcano" Garozzo

October 23 - I showed up ready to play today at 7pm and loaded up some CSDM in 1.6, honing in on my individual skills for an hour on my own time. I enjoy playing deathmatch when 3D isn't doing any team oriented practicing; it helps me stay sharp in my aiming. At 8pm, we began our 4 hour long XFire Counter-strike: Source event. Of course, I joined all the Counter-strike Source Deathmatch servers I could find, and surprisingly I was playing pretty well for playing less than 10 hours of source in my whole life. I was holding up 3:1 and 4:1 ratios in deathmatch servers, sometimes even as high as 6:1 ratios consistently. After the 2 hours of pubbing, we chose winners to join us in some source pugs. 3D and PowersGaming split off into teams and played with the chosen pug participants. I believe it was a success and all the participants enjoyed themselves.

Well, after the XFire event, the night was only heating up. We had a CAL Razer Semi-finals match vs EG on de_cpl_mill. CAL Razer is an online tournament with a LAN component for the finals where the first place prize is $9,000. Needless to say, this was a pretty serious match. The match ended up going live at around 12:30 at night which is probably one of the latest matches I have ever played online. EG came out extremely strong and put us down 5-0 to start. We composed ourselves and managed to finish the half 8-7 in our favor, which is a testament to the ability of the guys on this team in those high pressure situations. Second half also seemed to be looking bleak with EG winning the ever-important pistol round, but we managed to mount an even larger comeback this half than the one we made in the first half and won the match in convincing fashion. After all was said and done, it was about 1:30 am so we called it a night.

October 24 - Today marked our first day of team scrimmages in Counter-strike: Source. We began by playing one of the many source teams on de_train and won it rather easily. Our next challenge was PowersGaming on de_inferno. We ended up winning, a huge feat for our second scrimmage beating one of the best source teams in the world. We played them again on de_train and lost several rounds due to careless mistakes. The second half wasn't able to be played since PowersGaming had a match, but they did have our number in the first half.

Afterwards, we tried to scrim Verge, another top Counter-strike: Source team, but Mikey (Method) was having computer problems so we ended up calling it a night. Tomorrow will be another day of Source practice for us in preparation for WCG.

October 25 - We ended up not practicing today due to extenuating circumstances in people's schedules so I used the day to plan my trip to WCG. I wrote e-mails to my professors about missing class and tried to work out arrangements with them allowing me to go to Singapore. I also worked on some of my individual skills by playing CS Deathmatch late at night.

October 26 - Practice started off with a source scrim on Source's version of de_cpl_mill, we played PowersGaming and didn't do too well; we put up a decent number of rounds but ended up losing. We learned some valuable gameplay techniques from this scrimmage however and carried it over into our next scrimmage with iDemise on de_dust2 and beat them handily. Also, we had a match scheduled for CEVO on de_russka vs. ue but they opted to reschedule since they couldn't field 5. I used the time after our source scrims to play CS 1.6 DM (as usual).

October 27 - Today it was back to 1.6 for our rescheduled CEVO match on de_russka. We had never had an opportunity to play this match before today so it was interesting to say the least. We did the best we could to learn this map to be ready for the match but it just wasn't enough as we lost to ue in a tight match that went to overtime. After the completion of today's match, we plan on getting back to working on our source skills as a team to prepare for the World Cyber Games. With that said, we hope to represent the USA as well as we did last year and make our country proud.

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Road to The WCG 2004