WCG 2008: Day 2 Results

The second day of World Cyber Games 2008 marks the end of the group stage for all titles part of the event. Pakistan’s games for CS, FIFA and CnC3 have been completed and the results were not bad at all!

FIFA player ‘SmoothCriminal’ had a very impressive run in his group. With a total of four games that he had to play, he was up 2-0 initially. I personally thought he was going to qualify from his group since he was leading the points table at that time. He lost the next two games, however, due to which he was tied for second place. ‘Orchi’ from Bangladesh managed to win the tie-breaker between them and qualified from the group with SmoothCriminal finishing third. (EDIT: There was no tie-breaker between them. In fact second place was awarded directly to the winner of their head to head group match - Orchi).

Team ‘incredibles’ who are representing Pakistan for Counter-Strike went 1-4 in their group with their win being against Simplex. Their losses include a very close game against ’Assassin List’ from UAE.

For CnC 3, ‘Pantera’ was able to take two maps out of six, finishing 2-4 overall in his group.

This year’s WCG can be considered a success for Pakistan, especially taking into consideration the performance of Warcrafter Bilal ‘Stud’ Rasheed and our FIFA representative ‘SmoothCriminal’, both of whom almost qualified from their respective groups. Most people expected a bit more from -i-, but we must not forget that there is a lot more competition in CS, Warcraft and Starcraft as compared to other games… so their wins count more!

Moving on to the international scene, there were some major upsets in the Warcraft tournament. Since WCG divides players into pools randomly instead of seeding them, some pools had a lot of good players grouped together.

The biggest upset by far was seeing this year’s ESWC champion ‘mTwAMD.Who’ not qualify from the group. With losses against Like, bonecracker and moon-glade, he finished 4th in his group. Other than that, ‘fnatic.FoCuS’ also failed to qualify from his group, losing to Rotterdam, Lucifron and Aca. With 2 out of 3 Koreans out already, MYM]Moon remains their only hope, who will be facing Sokol today in the single elimation round of 16. Other favorites who are still in this tournament include Grubby, TeD, Happy, HoT, ToD and Like.

Keep checking this blog for another post on day 3 results!