Two days from now, the CounterStrike 1.6-tournament at ESWC Masters will commence. For MYM's Polish CS-team, the event is a culmination of eight intensive days of training. Eight days in Copenhagen, far away from the player's homes. Eight days with tactics, counter-tactics, demo-watching and practice-games.

This amount of training is absolutely necessary. Many of the coming participants in the French event have the same ambitious approach to the training. The training-hours for a top-team in CounterStrike is, if not higher, then at the same level as what professional soccer-players endure.

When the team arrives in France in the weekend, they will face opponents of mixed quality. But none of them have taken the training lightly, and any of those teams could be a potential David for the Polish Goliaths. They might not have the same level in their game, but their preparations will not be short of what the MYM-team has had.

ESWC have the same group of admins each year, which ensures smoother handling of the tournament.

The professionalism amongst the teams has pushed the game to a new level. A level where little details can have detrimental effect on the results. After all we wa't to see which team is the best, not which team has the best computers or knows how to use the rules to their benefit. Thus, it is important that everything surrounding the games is handled professionally.

With the last years developement in prizemoney and professionalism, the tournament organizers have to take the consquence and do theirs to eliminate external elements which can decide the matches.

At the World Cyber Games 2007, the tournament management claimed an unfortunate spotlight, as they made a series of controversial verdicts - to say the least. The volunteer admins, which WCG has a tradition to use, were not aware of the rules, nor had they experience enough with the admin work.

[WCG] Admins placed behind the players were supposed to ease the work -
it didn't, mostly because the admins didn't know what to look for.

While some of the guilt can be placed upon the vaguely formulated rules, there is no excuse for the extremely weak judgement, showcased by the admins.

Take for example eSTRO's continued complaints in their match against the Norwegian MYM-team at the event. While the Koreans had abused the forbidden "duckjump" in a groupstage-match against fnatic, they still filed a complaint when the Norwegians did the same in the Round of 16.

Although eSTRO had already signed the match-result, thus passing on their chance to complain, the admins ruled the signing void, as they claimed the Koreans had been victims to misunderstandings.

Picture by readmore.de

[WCG] Korean admin along with eSTRO and a Korean sponsor representative -
where is the integrity?

Furthermore, the admins also failed to interfere in the disgraceful Quarter-Final between Virtus.Pro and eMazing Gaming, where a fierce fight on words broke out - almost resulting in an on-stage fistfight. GotFrag's lead journalist Jonas 'BSL' Vikan went on to call the event "World sCandal Games" in a feature-article about the many controversies in the tournament.

In recent time, we have seen the ~€ 10,000 tournament at DreamHack Summer almost crash and burn, as the admins failed to keep their schedule. Only quick interaction by HLTV.org's Marc 'Nix0n' Winther avoided a total catastrophe, as the tournament's BYOC-part wasn't even planned on beforehand.

MYM gearing up for a late night at the WGT-tournament at DreamHack.

Despite the Dane's effort to help the WGT-crew, they went on to delay the tournament. When the Grand Final was finally played at 4 AM Tuesday morning, the tournament was more than four hours delayed.

For tournaments with thousands of dollars in the prize-pool that is not acceptable. You have to have professional admins; you can't let amateurs run a professional tournament.

Matthieu Dallon, CEO of Game Services - the company behind the ESWC, has realized that long ago. Gathering a tightly knit team of admins has secured a smooth operation of the last year's tournaments.

For ESWC it has built up a backbone of experienced match-admins, who are all able to handle the stress that is caused by the unavoidable match-conflicts. They are not intimidated by an angry Danny 'zonic' Sorensen or used as a psychological punchingbag by national partners.

For the players, who are returning to these events year after year, it is a safety net. They know that they won't have to face incompetent amateurs who don't know the rules, or are afraid of ruling against a sponsor's wish.

The ESWC crew is a tightly knit unit.

And while most people are still wishing Angel Munoz a very cold winter, his Cyber Professional League had its good points. One of them were the tournament administration. With a thick line under "professional", CPL managed to run a 256-team double-elimination bracket without real delay on more than one occasion.

If Mr. Munoz some day has to make a list of what made his events so successful, he can easily name his admin-crew in one of the top three positions. The smooth execution of the tournaments helped to build the CPL-brand to what it was in both USA and Europe.

Hosting a big tournament is not only about putting in five-digit dollar-prizes for the top positions. The money put into administrating the tournament has to equal the professionalism shown by sponsors, players and surrounds.

After all we don't want a scenario where the professional efforts by the players, are being torn apart by amateur admins who can't cope with their task, do we?