Day one of ES World Cup is about to end when I am writing this blog.
The venue is in a impressive location, called "The Louvre" in the middle of Paris. Many gamers came from all around the globe to represent their team and their country in one of the biggest, if not the biggest tournament of the year. Not just the major games are picked for this tournament but ES World Cup also took care of the smaller scenes, such as Unreal Tournament 2004, Gran Turismo, Pro Evolution Soccer 4 and Quake3, which has been part of the gamelist of Ligarena (organizer of ES World Cup) for many years already.

With Fnatic players, I would say, it goes "ok". Bjarke is already out of the tournament, the same goes for R0X. While toxic and Lauke managed to get to the second round by ending third and first of their group. Tomorrow, SaSe and Creolophus are in action in the WarCraft 3 tournament. Both have some though games in their groups but they have a great chance of getting to the second group stage, where the competition will of course be even stronger.

The story for me is that I had a very enjoyable trip to Paris, much better then last year when I had a car accident on the way to Poitiers with also Memetic(the driver), zr0 and if22 in the car.
I took the thalys at 13:00, same for all the Dutch ESWC attendees, including Tommy (snakeye) and Maarten (Black2lip). After we pasted the train station of Rotterdam in Holland, we decided to search for the bar and decided to dead the time by drinking a few beers with the guys from CEA, the Dutch Counter-Strike team. It was fun and the trip was fast. After we ended up at the train station of Gard du Nord, we took the subway to our hotel, which is located 5 minutes away from the venue, The Louvre. So before we knew we were in our hotel. However, on the way to the hotel, someone was talking to me at the subway station, a person with a blue shirt on, and a accent, that was hard to understand, a few seconds later, I found out that it was THERAILMCCOY! He said, "hi Joris, thats you right? I am Patrick, THERAILMCCOY" What a timing, stepping in the exact same subway as we did, at the very same time. He came from the airport, so he came from a whole different direction than we did.
After putting our bags and stuff in our room, we (me, snakeye and THERAILMCCOY) decided to go and walk around a bit to search for the location, however the opening of ES World Cup wasn't in The Louvre (we knew that) but we thought that we could get a glim from the location, but at that time, The Louvre was already closed completely. So we decided to search for a nice restaurant and eat some food. During the night me, snakeye and Black2lip watched two movies and we went to bed to get up early today to follow the first day of the tournament. And here I am, writing this blog at 20:00 CET at the press area. Having followed quite a lot of games and especially some intesting games.

From tomorrow its getting more interesting with the last and deciding games for Counter-Strike, but also the second group stage of Unreal Tournament 2004 and seeing the other two warcraft 3 players of Fnatic in action. Tommorow, two players that are present at this tournament will post a blog, and we keep the coverage going on at http://eswc.fnatic.com/, so be sure that you check our website frequently. You might want to check out our demo section, since Black2lip has been uploading some interesting demos of fnatic players in action!

It feels great to be at this event with so many players from Fnatic, considering the fact that we "secretly" had Lauke already playing with the fnatic name last year, without no one knowing what Fnatic was, and wondering why he didn't have the Xtreme tag. It feels even greater that we are one year further and have such a strong support from our sponsors: Everglide, Intel Desktop Boards and NVIDIA, which I want to thank for their great support.

Other then that, I hope that the PK guys and CS team are going to do great, I am sure they will! Hopefully, zr0 will be able to update with a blog as well how the Summer event is in Dallas, on the other side of the world! Here it's great, however, the weather isnt. I've seen better in France:)

Joris "sizah" van Laerhoven, from Paris, France.