Another Dreamhack is over and the curse that makes it impossible for us to win in Jönköping is still present.

In the moments of those dire defeats all the thoughts running through your head where you are trying to come up with reasons why you lose.
We rarely crash out of tournaments this early, I think we have to go back more than 7 months to find our last 5-8th placement so I guess you can say we don´t really know how to react to those early failures.
The normal "excuse" would be that we didnt prepare enough. having me and Harley in Asia for 2 weeks for MSI promotion, but I do think we managed to play as much as the rest of the teams especially since we spent 5 weeks on LAN together just the days before Dreamhack.

So, if we did prepare enough, why did we then lose? Didnt we perform our best? I think there were many elements that made us unable to perform our best. First off we were attending 4 tournaments during 3 days which of course took its toll of keeping a solid level and obviously playing many matches in different tournaments against the same team will make you very easy to  read, something we felt today playing h2k, who played a perfect game tactically wise.

Another side-effect of playing several concurrent tournaments was the lack of sleep. I think we had around 4 hours of sleep per day since we have to spend 15 hours on the venue being shipped from tournament to tournament to keep up on the busy schedule Dreamhack had set up.
In addition to this I feel personally that I did a pretty weak job calling the shots this weekend, except the first day where we played really really good.
The rest of the time were my tactics just out of sync and we were too optimistic a couple of times, buying rifles when we were very low on cash just to get a shot on winning the map instead of making it draw.

Our lessons from Dreamhack is to keep up with the practise and extend our tactic arsenal, after this weekend its very obvious  we are way too easy to read. And during days when your aim is not 100% you really need decent tactics to rely on, otherwise it´s game over playing on this level.
Finally, I want to stress that the reader should not see this blog as a letter of excuses, it´s just a way for me to analyze our failures in order to perform better next time.

Hats off for the teams beating us during Dreamhack, revenge is coming up at ESWC!!

Over and out!

Your friend Patrik