yoanm5

It's been a while.....

2008-07-23T13:17:16Z

I've been thinking about blogging again for a while now, but never really got to it.
I previously wrote a pre WWI and an after ESWC Masters blog, but i only went halfway through it, and after re-reading i found them quite mediocre, so i didn't finish nor post them.

I recently parted ways with Mousesports, and moved to Korea where i just moved in into a new apartment, i've been practicing quite much since i arrived.

My desktop, laddering while watching Starcraft matches!

Now i randomly decided to write here and now, by some kind of luck i remembered the password of my account~

Actually i don't feel like writing too much right now, i went out drinking yesterday and didn't sleep much because of hangover, so i woke up early and couldn't sleep again.

So i decided to play some ladder, and lost to an Elf on TS when i went MK first, and missed a few game winning surrounds.
I usually never play in the morning before showering, but these days i really wanted to play ladder, and didn't have the patience to awaken myself correctly and just rushed to my computer to play when i got up, without eating nor showering.

Current Kalimdor S6 ranking

After a few games though i usually come back to reality and get some stuff done !
I played vs Lyn up next in a quite nice game, it was funny because we both played different than usual as we both watched Sky vs Fly where some unconventional things happened affecting my and Lyn's game.

This afternoon i went to visit Lucifer, we went to eat bbq with him and his brother ( Michael ), after that, i said i wanted to go to supermarket and although Lucifer has an important match vs WhO tomorrow he decided to come and help.

It was funny how dedicated he was, every time i named something i needed, he jumped forward and went to ask some employees where we could find it. Eventually i bought a whole lot of things including food, dishes, soap etc and had to pay up to around 82$.

Headed home by cab, took care of the groceries then went to meet a friend to buy a phone charger, since i bought one earlier and there was no charger in the box... !

Tonight i laddered some again, won like 3 or 4 games i think not vs very famous players though.

I had a though time when i reached Korea because a friend was supposed to help me, let me stay at his place and help me look for apartments, and at the last minute he said he couldn't.

I ended up crashing at Shortround's apartment and having a really hard time finding people who could help me visit places which is kinda sad considering i'm supposed to have a lot of friends in Korea. Lots of them live too far, some others dont speak good English enough, and some others were too busy apparently.

Eventually i found one and now moved in just 2 days ago and i'm really happy and motivated, but in the same time i was quite upset these days because of all the struggle, and also very stressed, so when something went wrong with people or in ladder games i easily got really angry and said a lot of bad shit! so to those i might have offended sorry^^

I got a brand new camera so don't be surprised if i blog again later with many pictures~!
That's it for now, at the end there's a song i'm really addicted to right now, i'm also adding a few pictures, i had a crazy week of clubbing in China before leaving it just wanna say hi to all my friends down here !~

Feifei, Bigshow, Yacine, me, Taemin

William, Bigshow, nobrac, Kim, me

Taemin, Kim, Bigshow

Yacine & me

Time is tickin.....

Christmas blog up!

2006-12-26T18:07:45Z

http://www.four-kings.com/index.php?p=blogs&id=16 ~
include pictures & a replay, enjoy !

Posted new entry!

2006-12-14T23:18:06Z

http://www.four-kings.com/?p=blogs&id=14

there ! ;D

EDIT: uploaded a new set of pictures which i had taken with my mobile:)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoanm5/

EDIT2: as promised here's a rep of my practice ~ havent played too many good players so far but this was one of them.
http://www.four-kings.com/?p=filedetails&id=156

Why not update now~

2006-12-03T20:01:34Z

It is 3:30am, we are Monday 4th December, I wrote my last entry on the november 22nd before going to play Moon, That same morning i went to have Breakfast by myself, i had the traditional Korean Barbeque aka Sam Gyup Sal, but i couldnt order it by myself since you have to be 2 at least, so i ordered still but had to pay like 17$ just for me .... I still ate all the meat i was so hungry and didnt wanna waste any food .. i was so full. After that i went back to the hotel and played a few mores games before Crystal came and picked me up to bring me at the Coex to get ready for my game.

I had to go there pretty early, not sure why xD I used my own computer so there was no matter of hardware issue, but the lights in front of me were blinding me. I had a ladder account with like 24/0, i played on it 2 warmup games and lost both of em .... There can be no coincidence i didnt feel comfortable with the setup, i asked them to turn off those lights and it took a long time and alot of negotiations to finally get it half done.

Shortly after, the series started on Echo Isle, where i won rather easily and surprisingly after rifle pushing him.
After this game finished i asked if i could use the restroom and i was asked to wait 1 more game to do so. But during the game i felt the urge to go and played like in a hurry making alot of mistakes since you need alot of patience to play Warcraft, in the end i lost alot of units and decided to just call it gg, so i could reach the restroom on time not for a drama to happen xD
3rd game started on TM and to my surprise he went for some bs strat mass balista .... too much cockyness or i dont know why he would do such a crazy thing, but anyway i won.
4th game on TS, Panda first for him, expo for me then some good harass, i had huge advantage, at tier2 he added pitlord and started massing dryads, at one point he had alot of units damage both heroes half hp and almost all his wells empty, he was at 40pop, i was at 50 with 1500 gold, without production buildings , nor shop or farms, i guess thats pretty much why i lost , gave him too much time while if i just made alot of units and towered his expo there was nothing he could do.
5th game on EI, went for expo this time and didnt play particulary good again making alot of mistakes and so, i lost logically to someone who practice plenty more than me and wanted to win alot more.

Overall im not disapointed at all for losing this, and im even pleased with winning 2 maps i didnt expect this whatsoever.

The day after the match i went to club with Rekrul GiYoM and 2 of their Korean friends, it was pretty fun but i had to fly the next morning and went to the airport without sleep and with a pretty bad hungover xD

Luckily i was flying with Korean Air this time and that flight might have been the best ive had in my entire life! So many movies on the personnal screen i got, could Fastforward pause, do everything, i watched Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift for the first time, aswell as John Tucker must die and Clik with adam sandler =)

As i arrived in Sweden there was a cab driver who had a paper with my name on it, drove me to the hotel where i met SaSe in the lobby, dropped my luggage in my room and went to eat at the macdonalds where i met GlaiVe for the first time. Went to sleep shortly after that, had to wakeup early the next morning.

Next morning had breakfast with some players, was at same table as the Bulgarians, we joked around alot like always with DIDI/Inso.
After that everyone headed to Inferno Online in a couple of cab where we met the ESL crew and got to setup our stuff.

My first game was against Hum4nic i won pretty easily 2/0 as i expected to.
Second vs Insomnia i think it was, won 2/0, i played excelent those games and was myself surprised by it , especially as i almost never practice Human vs Human.
Third game vs DIDI, dropped a map which really pissed me off by the way i lost it, played pretty good and lost hardly .... but i guess Elf is Elf :D
Fourth and last game vs Shocker won rather easily 2/0.

So i was through, i was pretty tired this evening and was the first player to leave back to the hotel (alone) to go to sleep.

Next morning same story, wakeup , breakfast. While going downstairs to eat breakfast someone told me i had to play vs DieSeL this morning, i was surprised because all i knew from the previous evening ( thx to SaSe's sms ) was that i was gonna have to play vs the winner of DieSeL vs Duck.
I thought i was gonna have to face Duck tbh , and prepared alot of counters to his herofocus strat in my head... ! But now .. i had to play Elf ... xD

dropped a map vs him too, just like vs DIDI8, really got me angry, cant even remember if it was the first game or second... I erased those games off my memory unconciously because my mind can't take the pain :D

Anyway won 2/1 and advanced, was top 4 already which means i'm qualified for the global finals.
Played vs Insomnia next and lost 1/2 then lost to Grubby 1/2, which makes me rank #4.

Everyone went to eat together after that except me who was too tired again and slept early, the next morning i went to Gothenburg by train with SaSe, and in the Stockholm's train station i recognized a guy i often get to see at tournaments, it was NiP-ins going home from a stay in Stockholm, chatted for a bit before the train arrived, funny coincidence :)

Arrived in Gothenburg finally, on our way we had tried to book our tickets for 2 days after to fly to Beijing but had failed due to a rather weird service provided by the company we used !
As i got off the train which was like an outdoor subway we took in Gothenburg i saw a blond girl walking by and smiling and thought wtf~! Turned around to Kim and he said "that's my sister", i was surprised, didnt know he had a sister and didnt know she was this pretty! :)

Anyway his mom picked us up at the station and drove us to his home where we stayed like this 2 nights. I setup my comp in Kim's room during my stay and we both practicing a bunch, i also caught up to PrisonBreak and Heroes, had missed the two last episodes of each show

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
MAJOR EDIT
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

What you've read above was the part1 of this blog, in the part 2 i talked about everything until now but something bad happened .... i wrote for like 1h30 in a row after part1, and suddendly my comp restarted ... i looked down, i had pushed the power button accidentally with my foot, it was 4:30am i got mad and went to sleep. Dont feel like re-writing everything so instead im just going to provide you with alot of pictures i have took from Italy/Korea/China =)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoanm5/

I also will try to post more replays in the future in this blog if i can.

Cya for now :)

vs Moon pre-match

2006-11-22T01:44:56Z

Yesterday, went to lotte world from 10am to 5pm, was hella fun, gona write about it later with lots of pictures, after that i came back to my hotel, took a nap and played a single practice game vs Wd)Carey before chatting for a bit and going to sleep xD
today will be playing Moon hope i can not do too bad, i'm actually almost eager to play this match, those practices games i played have changed my view on the matchup a little and i found a strategy that's almost enjoyable to do-,-
My confidence in winning this match is still quite low but i guess i will try.

Before yesterday i played practice games for most of the day against several elves, like Go)Yange or ReMinD, wNv.Kelvin etc~

I read a cool interview of Duck there:
http://wc3.gosugamers.net/news.php?id=5269

And i'd like to mention something about my game vs him in Extreme Masters, i'm not shamed for losing to him, he's an excellent player, i was mad at many things including myself which is part of why i asked to leave Extreme Masters, there are things i have really hard time to accept, like that color thing or the hard time i get every time i wanna schedule a game and also something in didnt mention in my previous blog which is the lack of serious of certain people like our admin for this game which i'm not going to mention the name of, who got the maps wrong and told the host to make on a wrong map twice which kinda pissed us off, i mean it's not too hard to remember the maps right and it's the kind of thing that can really annoy players when we are trying really hard to focus only on the next game we are going to play. Also the admin made us remove the maps wrongfully, he said i had to remove first cuz i was lower ranking than Duck in the group while it was the opposite and removing first kinda sucks.

Anyway i saw that many websites felt obligated to post about this, quoting only a small part of my feelings making it look like i just wanted to leave the Masters cuz of some color bullshitstory, it kinda amused me.
MBC did around the same thing with one of my interview to be honest, it was video interview and they asked me "why do you always say elf sagi?"
I answered for like 3min long , about how when flawlessly played Elf is really strong and Moon is an excelent player which is why i thought i was gona have a tough time vs him , and on the W3 website i translated the answer of me they posted (written) and it looks like this:
ToD: ELF SAGI.

xD

Me vs Moon!

here's one of my practice games vs ReMinD njoy!
http://www.hochprozentig.org/vsremindeibulLSHIYT.w3g

Cool clip of BoA

I didnt go to club yet but i plan on going tonight aswell as tomorrow~
now is 10:32am just played few games vs ReMinD/SoJu, gona head out for breakfast~ i'm playing at 6:30pm i believe!

Korea~ here i come again

2006-11-15T15:11:45Z

Earlier i had to play vs Protois in Extreme Masters, i improved my game alot against Undead earlier which costed me to become quite bad vs Elf T_T so i was rather confident i could win, but Protois is a very particular player, can play more than 1 race and has a good vision of the game so he gave me a quite hard time in both games.

Last monday i went to Paris for the premiere of "Supreme Commander" a new RTS game coming out early 2007. The presentation of the game was quite nice and also the testing part of it which took place in the first floor of the eiffel tower. I hadnt been there since i was a kid so i took the trip on the 3rd floor and took a whole bunch of pictures. Eiffel tower was nice, i was rather amused by the fact that 80% of the people were Japanese , mostly being group of young girls~

Anyway i knew i was probably gona go again to Korea soon last time i left and i was right ! i will be leaving to Seoul on this Friday 17/11! gona be a long trip! I'm really looking forward to it funwise, as in Clubbing and meeting friends. Today morning i went to the Chinese embassy again to make my visa so i couldnt watch the game Zacard vs Moon, but when i came back i saw that the score is 3/0 in the favor of Moon, and i was pretty surprised , i thought it was gonna be a close game.

I think it's a pity that i have to face an Elf in such a match, my shape vs Elf lately has been quite bad and my motivation is close to none to practice more vs em. Elf vs Human pretty much disgusts me of this game right now , every time i play it i lose more motivation to keep on practicing. Me vs Zacard would have been so much more interesting in my opinion, i practiced with him before he played Rainbow and the games were close always and pretty nice i thought.

Now i'm prolly going to lose hard, dont know if i should bother practicing for it.
I got an Extreme Masters match against ElakeDuck tomorrow and at that's a match that im looking forward to much more than my WWW match, even if Duck likes to hit&run with raiders alot it should be more fun than playing vs Elf. I didnt practice particulary much lately, i took rank #1 on Northrend with a winstreak of 44 games currently, played a few cgs aswell vs Phreak, Kiwikaki and Ciara but not many games.

My acc on Northrend.

I'm really looking forward to all my upcoming trips, on the 24/11 i will be flying directly from Korea to Sweden for the BNET finals. Then shortly after i will be going to China along with SaSe with whom im going to be looking for an appartment in Beijing.

More to come ! ~

edit1:
Lost 1/2 to ElakeDuck ...... got rank #1 and #5 Northrend didnt think i was gona lose this, but then .... it happend .... he made mass raiders and cliked on my heroes and won ... got so freakin angry for losing to this guy. He played poker almost all the time lately and beat me almost "easily", wheres the payback for all the practice i put up ? why is HU vs ud the endless fight vs destroyers, HU vs elf is DH chasing archmage then mass bears and nowdays HU vs orc is mass hero kill ? why is wc3 such a dumb game sometimes ? well i'd like to know. I see many people saying im not in shape , well i dont think that's true, 45 games win streak in ladder isnt nothing and i do ok results in practice too. I was confident for a game in which i lost ... I'm not confident to face Moon or for BNET playoffs nor for IEST ... really wonder how iam gona do there.
Ho yeah i requested ESL to remove me from Extreme Masters, im sick of having to negotiate/fight with Players/Admins for so freakin long to finally schedule a game for when i would like to play it, aswell as being forced to play with a different color than the one i usually use which can affect our game and is constantly being asked by giga-tv, and as im going to China soon i probably wont be able to play vs Europeans with decent lag anyway so that's pointless.

edit2:
Arrived in Korea earlier, Saturday morning, went to my hotel to drop my luggage then i headed to a pc cafe where the blizzard seasonIV finals were taking place, i met many friends there and watched the games. Went back to hotel and went to sleep at around 7 as i was dead tired.
This morning i woke up at around 5, and i thought none would be up but FoV was, we played some rdm/rdm then some 2's, i was in my hotel and he at Lucifer's home, then we both left at around same time to the pc cafe were seasonIV was held, when i arrived all the players who were playing today were already here, except for ReiGn. I gave some advice to ShowBu about what i thought what was best to do vs ud on certain maps but he lost 1/2 =[

In the end the final ranking today was:
1.Lucifer 2.Sweet 3.ReiGn 4.FoV 5.ReMinD 6.ShowBu , SuSiria didnt qualify and was pretty upset about it i think i tried to cheer him up today but didnt seem to be doing too good at it =/
Lyn didnt qualify either and took it with a smile, still was joking around alot the entire day just as much as if he had won, at one point i even said "all players who lost are going home but you stay !!" to tease him and he answered with a big smile "ME GOOD MIND !!" haha that was funny.

In the afternoon i went to do a photoshoot in a studio for W3, along with Moon, we made alot of fighting positions, first alone, then together and it was pretty hard not to laugh when we were suposed to look at each other in the eyes and look pisst, we kept on laughing, and we made it, it wouldnt be for too long, i was watching his face holding himself from laughing and kept bursting into laughs sometimes was funny :)

As i got done with the photoshoot i went back to MBC hero center which is the name of the mbc studio in the coex mall, ReMinD was killing ShowBu pretty hard on TR, i joked alot about Elf for a change, claping my hands everytime ReMinD staffed a bear :D
Then FoV played ReiGn and they were gona play HUvsORC then ORCvsHU but Blizzard orgas didnt let em, they wanted em to play for real , and UD vs UD, so they played UD/UD but agreed on going 2crypt every game. ReiGn won 2/1.
In final i dont think they agreed on anything but i dont think Sweet was particulary trying, went a funny bo, 2crypt first then zigurat and altar, firelord first game vs Lich, cryptlord second game with impale, vs darkranger and he lost 0/2.

When those games were finished we all went to eat together with Sweet ReiGn Lyn Showbu Lucifer ReMinD FoV EVE and Susiria. When we finished eating they all wanted to go home so they went to the subway and i went for some shopping by myself, bought a Levi's jean for like 180 000Krw, and a Fubu shirt for like 70 000krw, then took subway to Yeoksam and walked to my hotel =) Tomorrow im suposed to be going to a theme park called Everland, suposedly second best theme park in Korea, i'll take many pictures if i can, i'll be geting a usb cable for my cam tomorrow normally, so i can put many pictures and videos up !

Also i noticed many people come here to talk shit or badly to me or create arguments in comments so i decided that any agressive comment will be deleted, i wont argue unless i feel like it, and to those people who keep on thinking that i play for the spectators i wanna tell you something , i play for the people who know to appreciate my games and to respect in which conditions i like to play. Those who dont like me should feel free not to watch my replays and not to read my blog.

edit3: GOT A CABLE FOR MY CAM TODAY!!!!!!!!!! thx to Crystal ~! loading 169items from my cam on my comp atm lotsa good stuff to come !

Daily routine.... ?

2006-10-31T18:50:50Z

A girl i met in Beijing going by the name of Jerry has surprised me alot today when said she had a surprise for me and showed me this video she made about me, i couldnt link it directly here but u can find it there : http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/3zcaZflemrg/

I'm playing vs HoT in 15min for KOTH and my confidence is pretty shitty ... i think i can probably win on LT and that's it =l been struggling too much vs elf.

I'll update this after the game.

edit: ho well i lost 0/3 wc3 can be such a shitty game sometimes.

edit2: Earlier we played against fnatic and lost by 4/3, i'm pretty disapointed considering i'm suposedly pretty good vs Orc, i beat Satiini then XyLigan but lost to Duck ... could have been an all-kill if i played good, well i guess better luck next time. I stopped trying to practice 10hours a day and just play whenever i feel like it and i'm doing alot better already:)

Someone asked me if i could find out some infos about the girl singer in the song Bu De Bu Ai, does anyone know if she has her own album or did she sing in any more songs ? anything about her would be nice.

Here's a few funny link i enjoy watching from time to time and i'm gona share with u :

Some crazy Korean dancing on a tv show:
http://aura.damoim.net/pages/external/external_movie.asp?usernum=13844490&movieseq=7357261&companycd=4

Some more great dancing but this time on DRR:
http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-7533213853543163778&q=dance+dance+revolution

Plastic dancing!

I recently found a video on internet where i heard my favorite song that i used to heard every time i would go to club in China, the bad part about this is that i didnt know the title of it and the video i found it with was of very bad quality and i could barely hear the song at all. But as i like it really much i gave it to nearly all of my chinese friends asking them if they knew it and could try to ID it, find it and send it to me .. My hopes werent too big as almost all of my friends we're saying they dont know it but after 2 days sissbaby said she found it and i couldnt believe it, she sent it to me and it was the right one i was so happy ~
When i heard this song in the club i rush the dancefloor feels just nice to get the same feeling at home!
For those who wanna try to get it the name is : 阿曼尼_曲

My schedule is going to get really tight soon, I'm going to Paris for a day on the 13th for the Premiere of a new game coming out made by THQ called "Supreme commander" they are inviting me there to give my opinion about this brand new game to the medias coming from everywhere.

On the 3rd week of November i will be going to SouthKorea (probably) for WWW, I had declined their invitation recently because i thought the map pool was too bad and didnt wanna play on these maps ( it was TR/TM/GW/EI/TS ) but they changed it or may agree to change it apparently. Then a few days after this there will be the Ladder season IV playoffs in Sweden, and then in early December i'll be going to China, Beijing with SaSe to look for an appartment and also play in the IEST Tournament.

Home again~

2006-10-23T20:02:21Z

decided not to blog about WCG, dont feel like it right now.
Maybe ill do it if enough request are made, that'll be like 300 =D

My opinion about WCG: Sky>all

Anyway i learnt alot from this last WCG which is why im going to practice right now. bbl~

edit: seems alot harder than i thought to practice like sky alot of games in a row ... i get extremely bored after same games and started flaming all my opponents and lose like half of my games .. i wonder if i can ever play as much as him .... right now doesnt look like its working at all T,T

edit2: we got 300 but most of it is spamm from same people .. so not gona write just yet =P
i'm trying to practice hard ... but its too hard for me whenever i lose a game against pure imbalance like this afternoon a game vs Deadman on TR i just get too mad and start flaming and cant stop, this game really pisses me off sometimes

edit3: i started writing blog but after 10min i figured it was gona take really long and gave up, not enough motivated to write just yet i guess. I also had never played as much as the past 3 days Zeus kept calling me monster because i played like 30 or 35 games every day and it didnt really work out too well i guess i lost alot to elf for a change, and today i had a french EPS game against a french Elf played named BlaST and i lost 1/2, this really is depressing i decided i need a break from wc3 and updated pokerstars and am now playing 4 tables at low stakes as i'm writing this. Been playing pretty good since i started scored some good stuff for a low roller like:
Dealer: Game #6800445876: YoanM wins pot ($32.80) with two pair, Aces and Sevens

be back!

edit4:

Short video introducing WWW:

http://www.mncast.com/outSearch/mncPlayer.asp?movieID=10000533720061029002711&player=7

Here's a song i been listening to alot lately and which i would like to share with u =)

Bu de Bu Ai

tian tian dou xu yao ni ai,
wo de xing shi you ni cai,
I love you,
wo jiu shi yao ni rang wo mei tian dou jing cai

tian tian ba ta gua zhui bian
dao di shen me shi zhen ai
I love you
dao di you ji fen shuo de bi xiang xiang geng kuai

shi wo men gang qing feng fu tai kang kai
hai shi shang tian ang pai
shi wo men ben lai jiu shi na yi ban
hai shi she bu de tai guai
shi na yi chi yue ding le mei you lai
rang wo ku de xiang xiao hai
shi wo men ji zhe zheng ming wo chun zai
hai shi bu ai hui fa dai

baby
bu de bu ai, bu zhi kuai le chong he er lai,
bu de bu ai, fang xia bei shang chong her er lai,
bu de bu ai, fou zhi wo jiu shi qu wei lai

hai xiang shen me you qi bu neng zhi ji shi bai
ke shi mei tian dou guo de jing cai
tian tian dou xu yao ni ai
wo de xing zhi you ni zai
I love you
wo jiu shi yao ni rang wo mei tian dou jing cai

tian tian ba ta gua zhui bian
dao di shen me shi zhen ai
I love you
dao di you ji fen shuo de bi xiang xiang geng kuai

RAP :
I ask gal fren how you been
lai qu le ji hui
wo chong lai mei you xiang guo ai qing hui bian de ru chi wu nai,
shi ming yun ma, nan dao nan guo shi shang tian de an pai,
mei ban fa,
tian tian de mei tian de xing shi dao di you shui lai pei,
wo cheng xin, ni cheng yi
dan zhou wei rao ren huan jin shi zhong rang wo men wu fa zai zhi li zhi you xiang lian
wo jin cai, ni fa dai,
liang ke xin bu an de yao bai,
ying gai you de wei lai,
shi fou zhen ne na me wu fa qi dai
she bu de zai shang hai,
you're my girl my girl my friend
how much I love you so so much
kan zhe ni ai chou
yao wo ru he zhen me cheng shou mian dui
I'm sorry you're my sweetheart
my love
my one and only baby

hui bu hui you yi dian wu nai
hui bu hui you yi dian tai kuai
ke shi ni gei wo de ai
rang wo yang cheng le yi lai
xing zhong chong man ai de jie pai

tian tian dou xu yao ni ai
wo de xing shui you ni zai
I love you
wo jiu shi yao rang ni mei tian dou jing cai

tian tian ba ta gua zhui bian
dao di shen me shi zhen ai
I love you
dao di you ji fen shuo de bi xiang xiang geng kuai

Haaaaa busy days !

2006-10-13T03:47:35Z

Fighting~!

With alot of tournaments scheduled i can consider the upcoming 2 Months to be pretty busy, I didn't go to digitallife because it's too close to WCG, but i'm going to Italy on Monday 16th for WCG, then next month there IEST, CEG, CPL China, Showmatches for me in SouthKorea( maybe ) and WEG Open should start also probably in an asian country not being China or SouthKorea. There also will be IEST and WC3L playoffs somewhere in December maybe....

Cameliris, elquA, Me, Nediar & TheBest at WCG France.

I have practicing a few on my Aremys account on Northrend, before leaving to WCG France ( which i won ) i had 21/1, after geting home i played more and today i have 61/6, that's quite many loses but i've had some connection trouble lately and played when i was very sleepy sometimes. As far as i know all my 6 loses have been made by Russian players, i lost once to Deadman, twice to XyLigan, twice to MagicPeople. ( also known as GinsasH ) and once to glevera. ( i really suckt vs MagicPeople. and glevera. xD )
I loaned my acc ToD4K to tons of people which i dont think want to be revealed who they are just yet so i'll just leave it as "friends sharing acc" for now.

Aremys account on Northrend

I won a pretty nice mobile phone at WCG France being the samsung D900, i'm not too much of a phone person usually but i literally fell in love with this one =)

Samsung D900

I've been making plans with SaSe to move to China (Beijing)lately, and we have googled or browsed alot of stuff online, mostly being about apartments or mandarin class. We got some advice about where to live, some people did recommend me the business district, some others wu dao kou area, and some others chao yang park.
I guess what we're gona do is just go there somewhere next month, stay in a hotel, and visit apartments until we find one we like and rent it.

The rumor got spread that FoV probably may leave 4K soon to join wNv , so many people have been asking if it's true .... The answer is "Yes" he is supposed to team up with wNv soon and will also live in Beijing and study there.
My opinion about this, is that i was pretty surprised when i first heard about it but i understand FoV's point of view, and his chinese dream, who knows how long he has before he will have to go army... and he may have no time to struggle like me for finding apartment and class and doing everything by himself so wNv was just the easier way.

I wish him goodluck and i hope he will be as succesful in wNv as he was in 4K. Four Kings was a family and will always remain one!

4Kings in Seoul, Coex during Christmas 2004.

Me, FoV & Grubby about to leave to Club in Hangzhou.

Before yesterday we played against Mouz and it went pretty well for us, we got so-so lineup but managed to play good in most of our games. The clanwar didnt start too well as the lineups posted included only BasH in all the games against us, so we figured Mouz saw our lineup but we hadnt seen their real one yet ... Then WC3L said we should both re-enter a new lineup, but as we were discussing it they said they will just put the real lineups that had been entered before and that were supposed to have been used and shown publicly at first ( the only BasH thing was a material mistake apparently )
This lineup being :

FuRy vs TitaN
Me vs Fly100%
Grubby vs SaSe
FoV vs Giacomo

Since FuRy wasnt here ... ( ! ) and Fly100% apparently couldnt play due to too much lag and him not being able to use GGClient, we let them sub him with Happy and they let us sub FuRy with Creolophus. My solo started pretty well as i won on Temple quite easily after geting pretty lucky position. In the 2nd map i did also ok, puting up and exp and finding a greater healing then in late game i had 60 pop and he 50, destros no mana his heroes too i was chasing him mid-map and he disconnected .... I was quite disapointed as i did pretty good and thought i'll give a re. I waited until he re-connected and i asked what does he think about the game. Happy said "i think it was gg for you", then i said "then you wont mind if i take the win". He said something like "i dont care this kind of game", so i just took the win.

This score pretty much helped WE secure their spot in the playoffs but this is not what we played for ofcourse. I'm happy they will get the chance to go to Germany again, with all the experience they acquired from last and this season i'm sure they should be able to perform much better than the last time and maybe even win the whole thing ? :)

To finish with i've collected a few old pictures :D
Feel free to leave your feelings about what you've read here in comments, i think many people read this without leaving me some input which is a shame ! ~ i'd like to know everyone's feeling about these things.

Me jumping out of happiness while entering the stage after i won WEG Masters.

FuRy being FuRy

Russian delegation!

Me at the last Samsung Euro Championship

Me and Grubby at SEC.

Shortround, FuRy & Me at Blizzconn.

I kept the best for the end ! me and RotterdaM dancing on stage in Cargo club, Beijing! ;)

Home sweet home ~!

2006-10-04T05:12:50Z

I arrived home late at night earlier on the 3rd. It feels great to be home after i have been away for a whole month. I already miss Asia tho~ and cant wait to go there again soon.
I don't have a cable for my cam so i'm not gona write about last trip to Beijing just yet since i wanna include pictures in it.
As i got home and started to use my comp i had alot of trouble with it, it kept crashin and i was geting blue screens all the time but now it seems to be solved.
I finally got to watch the IEF replays and was quite amazed with Sky's performance especially against Elf.

Earlier today i did an interview for a tawainese website, you can find it here : http://esmania.twbbs.org/forum/read.php?tid=1803&page=1&toread=1
It's in both English and Mandarin.

Today 4K will play against fnatic, i hope i can win my match, i hadnt practiced anything since i lost to Deadman in the Kode5 Grandfinal until today where i played about 6 ladder games.

Lately i have been discussing with some people about eventually moving to China to play there and also learn chinese, for the moment it doesnt seem really possible but i keep on hoping and trying to make plans. SaSe also would like to go there so we are trying to figure out how difficult that would be and evaluate what are the possibilites to do it.

I guess the best would be to join a club like Zacard and Sweet did with BeT but it's not that easy, i dont wanna leave 4K for any other team personally but an additional sponsor could be an eventuality.

Ho yeah i bought an Ipod Nano earlier in Korea too and it's filled with Korean songs right now. I discovered Lee Soo Young recently and i really like her music =)

Pic of me in Kode5 that i found on www.nicez.com

More to come ~

Goodbye Korea! i will be back!

2006-09-25T15:52:16Z

First of all i would like u to see this !

! ! ! ! hehe

Well, its 11:36pm, i played for most of the day, i woke up very early at around 5am because i went to sleep particulary early yesterday at 9pm. Mostly because the day before, i went to meet a French friend in Sinsa. Ive known him for some time, he lived in Korea for around 8years and can speak a perfect Korean, his girlfriend is a model from Brazil so he knows alot of models, from several countries.

I met him at the subway station at 10pm then we went to his friends appartement, they were getting ready to go out, i was particulary hungry so we went to eat while the others were geting prepared. We had Sam gyup sal, the traditionnal Korean BBQ, my favorite one, ill try to put some pics up of this later. After we were done we went to a bar where his friend were suposed to be, now this didnt really turn out to be what i expect, i spent last christmas with this one friend and his friends and they were like around 10, so i expected the same amout of people to be here. But now it was around 30 people here and from all countries with mostly models from Brazil, a few from Russian and Ukraine, a Korean model who was GORGEOUS! and even a polish a model with which i had the chance to chat with a little, it was her first time to work in asia and she seemed to like it.

Thing that amazed me about this is that none got to pay for drinks here, it must have been some kind of mafia bar or something which is why im not going to mention the name of it nor where it was. But lets say it was pretty good, there was a main waiter which was awesome, juggling with the cups making cocktails, it was some Russian's girl birthday this night. The waiter lighted on fire a bunch of glasses and prepared a special drink during which he even did spit fire ;D i took some pics but i dont have the cable for my cam so i guess i will upload all of em later in another entry.

After a bunch of tequila shots, whisky, many tequila sunrise (my fav) and some drinks i dont even know the name of, we all headed to Spy a pretty cool club, in Itaewon which is like the foreigner area.. there is like a Russian club with big Russian letters to show its name at the front entrance
and alot of stuff which really makes u realise that u are not in Korea anymore once u stop in that area ;D

Was my 2nd time in this club, its not so big but pretty nice, most of people know each other and come here often, i had a really good time on the dance floor and even met somebody new there with who i talked for long time, i had great fun that night =p

I went out to club 3 times total during these 2 weeks, the one i just talked about was the 3rd time. The firt time was with a couple of players being : Susiria Lyn Sweet BerA EVE Lucifer ( Susiria & Lucifer's girlfriends also being here ) we met in Seoul where they were doing a video on an online stream done by mister Liu Shin which apparently is a famous caster. As i arrived there they werent done so i started to wait em until Susiria called me and told me to come in the room where they were doing the show to interview me. I didnt really take this seriously and made alot of funny answers =D as we got done we went to eat first Sam Gyup sal again ! and Lucifer bought it for me hehe, we always joke around about how we should buy food to each other every time has a player wins somehing, guess this time it was his turn =p Then we went to a HOF where we had alot of drinks. Doing some drinking sessions with Beer+Soju, oneshottin cups 1 by 1, was funny ;D Then after this we were supposed to go to a famous hiphop club called NB ( Noise Basement not Newbie ) In Gangnam.

But unfortunately i didnt take my passport with me as i forgot that it was necessary for Korean clubs ( its not in China, and i had been in China for a week before ) So we ended up going to a NightClub which is much more expensive, so ofcouse they are less careful about passports, at first they didnt wanna let me go in but then i went to talk to the guard who knew some english and told him "look at me dude, do i look younger than 20? (Korean age minimum is 20 in Korean age, im 22 or 23 Korean age i believe) I told him that i had been in this club before 3 times, and i described him how it was inside then he accepted to let me in ;P we got a table and whisky. That night was pretty fun, was very hard not to fall asleep on my way back, at 7am, around 1h of subway .... ㅜ.ㅜ

The 2nd time i went out was with an old friend, American, who used to be Starcraft Progamer. Rekrul is his nickname for those who may know. He invited me to go along with 2 of his Korean friends. We agreed when to meet and where to go on MSN and later on met in Gangnam station. We first went to eat with one of his friends then headed to the club. It was a pretty nice club, Club i , In Riviera hotel, Cheong-Dam. That night was pretty fun, my friend's friends were really nice and really helped me havin a great time.

Overall it was a great stay, not too expensive thx to ReMinD for letting me stay at his place , but not too cheap either, i had to pay for my own food/net cafe and the clubs i went to =D

I learnt a few new Korean words during this trip and even how to type some !
하이 ! 모해
토드 진짜 조아 ㅋㅋ
UD 사기 시러 진짜 씨발 ㅗㅜ.ㅜ
ㅡ.ㅡ

I probably have left out ALOT of details or journey which i could have talk about but im feeling pretty tired right now so that'll be it for now ;D ill be flying tomorrow to Beijing at around 2pm, will arrive at 3pm, PpG will arrive 1h30 after me so i will have somebody to hang out with for this day at least. Hope China will be fun too !
I think Kode5 should be a good tour, im looking forward to it, i prepared alot, but my worries right now are against Elf, i been encountering alot of trouble on the Kalimdor server against Elf and theres alot of em in Kode5, i been in particulary good shape vs ud lately doing especially good vs Korea top Undeads in the ladder.
in 128 games i have lost none to Orc even tho i met some pretty good ones a few times. i lost 2 games to Human total, the rest is only loses to Elf/Ud. I hope i can pull up and play good in the Kode5 finals and make a good performance because lately my motivation has been quite good but if the results dont follow, it may be very bad for my motivation, especially that lately alot of friends are trying to convince me to switch from wc3 to poker! and i gotta admit that its very tempting sometimes.

ill put online some pictures i have gathered.

ReMinD, Me and Go)Annie the ex 4K-manager in Korea

Me at the KEC tournament location

ReMinD, Me and PhoeNix_Vestige

Me and Miss Wonderful in MIX Club, Beijing, China.

SaSe & xiaOt in MIX club

Me & Soy in Cheon-Ho, South Korea

~ Enjoying my stay pretty much so far

2006-09-18T20:56:08Z

I decided not to write anymore long entries just yet as i'm pretty lazy and for now i prefer to just enjoy my trip ~ i came to korea on the 12th and so far i have been gaming alot, went to club only twice, once with a couple of other gamers and once with some old friend i know from my previous stay. Right now i'm ladderin quite a bit in the season4 of Kalimdor, currently at rank 8 with 27/3 ~ Later i'm going to meet some friends i know from inet or that i met earlier in Korea, i hope i will keep on having fun ~ wish this could last longer even tho it's not over yet and i will go to china again soon :)

Yesterday was a blast!

2006-09-08T07:00:24Z

Went to club until 5:30! i wanna write about it but i feel too lazy and dont like to type with Swedish keyboard keke :D
Maybe i shall write some about it later if enough requests are made?

aawwwww :l

2006-09-01T18:03:34Z

Just posting a short entry concerning my feelings today on Friday 1st, I went to Germany earlier and it didnt go too well for me .. Finished #4 in the ENC with France and #3 in the NGL with 4Kings ... at least we won our clanwar against mYm in wc3l 3/2... -_-
there was a closing party the day when we lost to mYm, and to celebrate my loses i decided to drink & dance~ it was fun but i kinda ended up in a hospital and slept here ... -_- I remember dancing on the dance floor and champagne bottles poping out of everywhere in front of me .. and me drinking more and more every time.

drinking is bad!

On my way back i had the opportunity to talk quite a bit with Nordhal which was quite nice since i didnt know him very much. I flew from Berlin to Marseille and slept over at my sister's home. The next morning went to China embassy to pickup my visa and left straight away for the airport as i was going to UK.

The tour in Germany made me question my motivation ... why did we lose so badly, should i continue to play this game and so on. In UK i was rather bored too, not too many players showed up and Oxford isnt really the kind of city where i feel comfortable ( never been there before and i have hard time with british accent ). There was almost no internet access at the event the whole time, and at my hotel the wireless wouldnt work either so there was almost nothing to do at all.

I won the qualifier rather easily without losing a map and earned my spot in the Kode5 Finals which will be held in China.

Today i went back home and the travel was pretty boring again.
In the airport London Heathrow i bought a bunch of stuff, 3 books ... 1 of them is "blink" ("the power of thinking without thinking") by Malcolm Gladwell, it's about how people sometimes takes decisions quickly and use "thin-slicing", the 2 others book are in my luggage which is not with me ;l
Bought a double CD "Clubbers guide summer 2006" on which there is alot of good tracks.
And finally bought a PSP game "Miam Vice" it's not bad at all i played some while waiting for my flight.

Clubbers guide Summer 2006

Blink

As i arrived in Marseille my luggage didnt popup at the baggage claim ,i went to lost&founds office and apparently they havent got it here yet. Problem is, i'm leaving to China tomorrow morning and i had a shitload of clothes to wash .... In the meantime when i was at the office the cab i had booked was waiting and it costs money too ...

I got back in Arles and went straight to hairdresser, dyed my hair darkblue and had haircut, got pretty much ready for alot of clubbin in Beijing with SaSe :D
Trying to see the bright side of things, i'm going to spend 1 month in Asia and it's probably going to be fun, but i'm just sad that my trips in Germany and UK didnt go very well, i'm quite disapointed about it and my lost luggage demoralised me even more ...

Anyway, leaving tomorrow this trip better be as good as i expect it to be !:D can't wait to go to Angel and Mix again :)

World E-sport Festival~ Story of a clubber!

2006-08-10T20:20:02Z

I wrote my last entry on July 27th and mentioned that my schedule would be pretty tight in the upcoming days and it was!

On saturday 29th i had to play a French Tour named wc3t ( www.wc3t.net ) and this same afternoon i had to play 4K vs SK in NGL but i was going in first, Grubby was and took out HoT Deadman and Sweet in this order but then lost to Zacard. I then stopped my tournament just before the semi and went to talk to Grubby and Zeus about who would be best to send vs Zacard in the end they both thought that'll be me so i said ok let's play.

I played against Zacard on TurtleRock and he used the same strat as in Blizzcon to my big surprise, but well since then i think i have dramatically improved vs Orc so i countered the strategy quite perfectly and won to make the score 4/1.

Back to my French Tour i won the semi 2-0 and in the WB final i met the best French Orc player AoD-PhenX and won 2/0 again. He had already beaten AoD-eLqua who's the best French Undead player in the WB so they probably were going to meet in LB again and so did they, this time eLqua took his revenge and he had to play me in the grand final but couldnt play this same evening so we postponed the game to the next day. You can see the whole bracket here :
http://www.esportsfrance.com/actualites/8299/

The next day i had a hard time waking up as i was going to the city for my nephew's birthday
It lasted the whole afternoon my sister really invited ALOT of her friends over so i got to know a few new people as i dont visit her that often. I got back home in the evening and i had to play against eLqua shortly after, didnt have much time to warmup but i still won 2/0 taking home the 100e prizemoney.

Me and my nephew at his birthday

On the 31st was the clanwar 4K vs WE, i thought i would get Sky on temple but i got to play vs Check. I was aware he recently beat Rainbow 2/0 on LT but it didnt scare me, I like playing vs Check he is a very good player and when i enjoy the game i play very good i think. I ended up winning 2/0 being a lil lucky sometimes and was happy with the overall score being 4K 4-1 WE.

This same evening i tried to fix the inet for my 2nd computer and completely messed up the whole thing, nothing was working anymore, i spent half of the night trying to fix it , even calling a 24/7 assistance phone number to help me fix it, some guy told me to do a shitload of stuff like reseting my ips n stuff and after 30min i think he ran out of solutions and just hung up the fucking phone, i was so mad.... I tried to install the inet thing on my old computer and it worked but it's pretty laggy so i couldnt practice this last day. I turned it off and went to sleep for a few hours.

Next morning when i woke up i was getin ready to leave and wanted to check some stuff online turned on my comp and guess what ... the internet was not working on this comp too now!

Anyway i just left to the train station where i waited like half an hour before geting on my train. Took a first trip to nîmes which was like 30min then had to wait there for like 1hour+ before my next train to Paris which took 3hours and half to get me to the airport.
As i got to the airport i had 5hours to wait, that's pretty unlucky if i took the next train from my town to the aiport i wouldnt arrive in time to catch my plane so i had to arrive long in advance. I want to a good restaurant and enjoyed my food pretty slowly, listened to some music and finally got to checkin for my flight.

Before flying i was sitting and waiting at the gate and some guy saw that i had a laptop with me so he asked me in english if i knew if there is any wireless around, i said that i asked when i checked in and they said theres none so i didnt try. So he went like ok lets try and turned his laptop on to check it out by himself. As he opened explorer he did make it to a wireless subscription page but apparently he had to pay for it and wasnt too happy about it. I made a joke about how you have to pay for everything in France even going to a public restroom, he seemed to agree.

My flight took off and i was able to sleep some, there was 2 French girls next to me who were just a little older than me, i started to talk to them some, they were going to China for 3 weeks to visit it entirely. Since i have already been here a couple of times i told em the name of some goodplaces for markets or clubbing :)
As we landed i thought Grubby and SaSe should already be waiting for me as they were suposed to arrive at around 8am for both of em and i arrive at 10am, but to my big surprise they hadnt arrived yet, some WEF guys picked me up and told me that SaSe's flight was late and that Grubby missed his flight.

So i waited for SaSe for a while and as he arrived we talked a whole bunch and headed to another Terminal to take our flight to QingDao. Some staff member told us that as Grubby missed he flight he would be coming the next day "maybe".
We joked around about how Grubby "accidentaly" missed his flight due to having 5 Elf players in the tour out of 8 players =p

Anyway we flew to QingDao and as we arrived we had to wait for SuhO to get there, it was so hot in the bus, i watched a few replays with SaSe, then SuhO arrived and we got going aswell as a TV crew who rode with us.

We finally reached our hotel which seemed to be pretty decent only by seing the lobby, we got told there would be no internet nor wireless as it was broken apparently.
went up to our room, rested some, then at night we decided to go to club.

And there it got pretty painful as the people working at the reception could barely speak any english, we asked them where we could find a Nightclub and i knew thei'll send us to a KTV so i said NO KTV !!! i even showed em some dance moves to make em understand that we dont wanna go to a god damn KTV but to a Nightclub. Anyway they gave us an address we took a cab to there and guess what ... ? it was a fucking KTV !

I stayed in the cab and tried to explain to the driver that what we wanted was to go to a nightclub and not a KTV, what one of the KTV waiters who was outside came to open the door and was like "come on in!" i said no thank you, we do not want KTV we wanna go to a dance club. Then he said to me ( with a perfect english accent ) " I suggest you come inside and take a look at the beautiful chinese girls" , i bursted into laughs. I knew KTV are well known to have many 'working girls' there but i never thought some waiter would ever tell me such thing.

Anyway we said no and and kept asking about a normal Club, there was one very close according to this guy, we headed here and it suckt it was more like a bar with a band playing drum&bass&guitar , i was like wtf.. lets get out of here.

As we got out of this place i noticed a few hundred meters away a pretty nice hotel which i had already seen the name of in another city and knew it was 4 stars, so i thought that for such a nice hotel they must have some people at the reception who can speak english.
We headed there and i was right, the guy could speak perfect english, we asked for a NightClub he said "sure , at the 2nd floor of this hotel" i checked the writings next to the elevator "KTV nightclub" i went back to him and said that we do not want KTV just a normal club, he said okay then you should go to "feeling"

And there it was, we headed here and it was a real club just like we wanted it, the dance floor was pretty ok and it was quite filled for a Tuesday night i think it was ?
Had a few drinks and headed to the dancefloor, there was like this huge round surface in the middle of the dancefloor that could go up&down all the time, like for the people who does gym i dont know how it is called in english but anyway it was really nice unless you get tired in the middle of it, then you can never pullout cuz you body keeps going up&left and you are surrounded by people.

It was our first time out and we got to meet some girls already, im not going to give many more details about this because i dont know if they wish to be mentioned aswell as SaSe, but let's say we had lots of fun geting to know new people.

The next day Grubby arrived in the afternoon me and SaSe were still sleeping and as we got up Grubby had already eaten and was now sleeping so we went to eat ourself with wufan and some other guys. I recognised one of them from the PLU team video and talked to him some, he gave me his business card.

After eating we headed back to the hotel and later on we got to go to a pc cafe where we spent the whole afternoon, a CS tournament was going on here so many people were screaming really loudly but it ended quickly luckily. I won most of my practice games, just lost 1 vs Keda on TM.
SaSe won most of his too , just lost 1 vs a local Orc.

After being done with gaming we went to eat all together with the local players and the owner of the pc cafe too. In the middle of the dinner me and SaSe said goodbye to everyone and we headed back to the hotel where we rested some before going out again to the same club. We called Grubby and asked him if he wanted to come but he wanted to sleep more, it was rather early in the evening at this time, so i told him how to get to the club in case he wants to come later, i also heard Wizard would be arriving soon.

We just went to the club and enjoyed it just like the previous day, SaSe had an apointment there with the girl he had met the day before. Later in the evening i forgot how exactly but we got to know that Wizard had arrived, prolly through SaSe's girl phone. I decided to go back to the hotel to pick him & Grubby up to bring em to the club ( it was 10min drive away )
I got the hotel and Grubby didnt feel like going, and Wizard was hesitating, he kept repeating that he has a girlfriend blabla.
I told him that it doesnt matter he can just go there to dance & drink doesnt need to necessarily rake some girls....
Ended up convincing him and he came back there with me and i dont think he regreted it.
Most enjoyable part was when at around 1am they threw those green lights which are like sabrelaser , looks so nice in the dark and if u dance with it.

We stayed for a while more then headed back to the hotel to get some rest for the next day where we would have to play.

At this point my memory is pretty confused, it's hard to remember in details a trip like this or what happened every day, but i think we got up and had breakfast then headed to the place we would be playing at.

At first when we entered the building it seemed like an exposition about mangas and stuff like this. We reached the room we would be playing in, it was pretty nice, no bad reflects on the screens, every player had his own assigned computer and they seemed to be pretty good.

The Starcraft bracket drawing was first, then came the drawing for Warcraft III. I got to play Moon first and i almost threw up when i saw what maps were going to be used for every round, TM & GW being the main reason of this.

I wasnt too happy about having to play Moon first, its single elimination, the loser would be out after 1 match and i dont think that Moon vs myself should be a 1/4 final game but anyway that's how things are this is just disapointing i would say.

I had to play GW first, i hate this map with the bottom of my soul, so i decided that instead of playing Human and probably losing and geting mad, i'll just try to have fun with random. I got to play Undead in this game and it was pretty fun, i surrounded his hero twice early game , then didnt really know what strategy to go for and the experience talked for itself in late game i got outplayed and lost :)

In the 2nd game on TS, as the random game on GW gave me lots of fun i decided to random again and got Human -_-.... I played a pretty classical game and won rather easily in the end.

3rd game on Echo... i thought it's a pretty ok map for Human even tho lately it's been really hard to play against the mighty panda, so i thought i'll give it a try with Human and i ended up winning.

I was partly happy and partly sad about this, happy because i won ofcourse but sad because i wasnt planning on playing seriously at first while Moon was, and just for that he probably deserved more than me to advance so i felt bad for him.. went up to him and said "sorry ... im so lucky"

After this game i heard that Check had lost to SuhO which kinda saddened me, i know SuhO a little but Check is a very good friend so ofcourse i wished for him to advance. Grubby and SaSe logically won over Wizard & Anas.

We had to wait the whole afternoon before playing one of the semi at night.... This semi was going to be me vs SaSe.
The maps were like GW/EI/TM..... with GW & TM in .. i felt pretty angry about being forced to play those maps and wanted to random it up again but i had to play on the stage .. like 2hours before the game i decided that i was going to play serious and with Human, because i dont think its very respectful for the public in QingDao or watching MBCgame to watch some guy fooling around playing random when they expect to see nice games.

During this whole day i was complaining about the maps and how unfair it is and i think that in the end it shall have made SaSe play worse. In the first game on GW i got some luck as i spawned next to him i went for am rifle naga and push , he made some mistake early game and lost both of his heroes, then i just pushed & finished it.
In the 2nd game on EI he didnt play like usually , played much more aggressive, was scared of my expo or not confident at all and i won again.
I felt pretty bad about this because he's a very good friend , and all my whine probably made him play worse than he should have so i proposed him to share the prize with me wherever we would end, he said he doesnt care about the money and is happy for me winning.

We headed back to the hotel and agreed to have a nap then get up later and go to club all together, we had the nap but woke up at around 2am and were too damn smashed so i said, let's not go tonight lets just sleep ... and so did we ... we slept around 13hours in a row, we were so tired ... and still had hard time geting up.

This one day i cant really recall what we did, Ha yeah i think it was this day me/Wizard/SaSe asked to get some western food as we were pretty disapointed at everything we ate earlier ( was mostly chinese ) we wanted something different. Wufan found us a French restaurant, we went there and ate some really nice food, it was expensive but definitely worth it. None of them could speak french tho ! :D

Later on we wanted to buy some DVDs so we went to a suposedly "market" but it wasnt really like the market there is in Shanghai at all... it was just like some shops on the streets and very spaced up in between, So we walked around and couldnt see any store that looked like anything that would have DVDs, so i decided to try my chance taking a random way and we ended up in the food area and completely lost ...
I was tired of always leading so i told Wizard to lead the way and that we would follow him now, we ended up walking into some dark street where there was some constructions going on and the workers looked at us like if they were going to jump on us and rob us... :D

We finally reached a decent area and then i told SaSe to take the lead, then at one time i just got into a shop and asked if they knew where we can find some DVDs. They pointed at a street just across the store, we headed here and finally found like music CD& DVD shop we asked for English movies, they took us in the back of the store where there was a secret room with shitload of copies
We chosed a whole bunch each of us and went back to the count. I told Wizard he was in charge of the bargaining part for this one and i have to say he really let me down. Bought those for so much more than we should have, i spent the rest of the trip back to the hotel whining about his bargainin skills.

As we got back to the hotel we watched the first half of a movie (Final Destination 3) and we left to the WEF gaming area. The last scene of the movie we saw was hilarious, it's when the black guy who's going gym gets cocky and something bad happens to him for those who have seen the movie ^^ we laughed so much about this and kept joking like screaming "FUCK THAT, I JUST WIN" or "DEATH IS SCARED OF ME".

As we arrived the gaming area Grubby vs SuhO was already going on, it was the 2nd map and it looked pretty good for SuhO.. He ended up winning and we had no idea of what the score was until they started the 3rd game. In this game it looked pretty good for vs SuhO until he got those chimeras going to Grubby's base where i thought he was just gona splash those 6 burrows and win the game but then something funny happened. The chimeras shot and didnt do shit to the burrows. Me/Wizard/SaSe got completely cracked up by this we couldnt stop laughing and joking about it the whole time.

Grubby finally won the game, I went up on the stage to congratulate him and said let's go to the club, he said sure. Many fans were here and many of them wanted to get some signatures, so i said let's stay and sign some before we go.
We sat down next to each other behind tables and asked Wufan to tell the fans to line up behind it and come get signatures one by one.
I took around 15min before we left, some people asked me for signatures and said really nice things such as "no matter what the result is, i will always support you" it's really cheerful to hear this and im very grateful to the fans who said that.

We headed back to the hotel and then went to the club, i called the Korean girl i had met earlier and told her i'll be at the club again tonite. We headed there pretty early, first sat down at the bar had a few beers, and cocktails.
Grubby played some drinking game with Wizard, while me and SaSe went to the dancefloor already.
Later in the night my Korean friend rejoined us and i stayed with her most of the time from there on.
At one time i was sitting here doin nothing and some guy at one table close took up one beer and put it up like cheers, and he took another one and poored it to me as a present. I took it said GAM BEI and drank some. Grubby/SaSe/Wizard had been invited by some old guy who was with 2 younger girls at the next table to play some drinking games, they seemed to be having fun.

At around 3am things got crazier, the guys had more alcohol in their blood than ever and i checked the dancefloor from my table i saw all the 3 of them dancing on the stage next to the deejay. I thought i was halucinating at first but no those guys were crazy, it was my 3rd time to this club and never had i seen anybody being allowed to dance on this stage. I thought "Why not ?" went there to dance with em too, the whole club was looking at us but it didnt matter.
Later on Hiki from mbcstaff came with some Starcraft players and some others people from the MBC staff. Tried to bring him in the middle of the dance floor to have him try. Ho and i bought some of those fireworks that you should hold in the air and theres like fire coming out of it on top , i gave some to everyone :)

The guys left the club at around 5 i think it was or 5:30, i stayed with my friend some more time outside of the club and went back to the hotel later on where i chatted with SaSe for a long while before finally sleeping.

The next morning the phone rang pretty early ( 1pm is very early for us !) SaSe had to get up and get ready to go to play SuhO... Which he did.
Think i slept some more, then met downstairs with Grubby & Wizard where there was some wireless internet apparently some i brought down my laptop and checked some news & my e-mail, during this time we read about some thread in sk saying that SaSe had lost 1-2 :/

Brought back our laptops to our room and went to the playing area where we got to play later in the evening.

Waiting to play

WEF Stage outdoors

Me setting up

Joking around with Grubby before the finals

warming up

On the first map being TurtleRock Grubby went for Undead and even tho i knew there was high chances for him to pick Undead on this map i had nearly no mental preparation for this game at all .. I ended up playing very badly, geting alot of footmen surounded by ghouls, then at one time i thought i was teching to tier3 already so i made an aviary to make gryphyns later on but i didnt tech .. so i made aviary pretty much for nothing and couldnt start my tech to tier3 for so long time due to lack of lumber, i had an useless aviary this whole time doing nothing -_-, I lost that game pretty badly.

The 2nd game being GW, we drawned close position and i logically won with some am/beast caster push.

In the 3rd game he picked Orc on TS and i played rather poorly again, forgeting to buy boots on my mage i had to use my tp early and from there on i was screwed, too scared to cross the bridges and get caught by raiders & co and lose badly, so i tried to play as safe as i can, but against a blade lvl 3 running around knowing constantly where iam and a tc powercreeping to the max there is not really any safeplay possible. I lost that game and finished #2.
Just like always i felt like if i could have been able to focus and play like i usually play at home i would have win this easily just like i did in WEG.

But isnt that what this game is about ? puting up with all the conditions all the time and being able to play your best in the tournaments. The players who does the most mistakes lose, that's how it is. Better luck next time i guess. I was still pretty happy about my performance for someone who wanted to play the tour "for fun" at first i finished #2 which is pretty good.

After the games finished we had to wait for the cs finals to be played and had to be at the closing ceremony where we got our checks.

The casters

2nd -,-

^_^

Who looks more disapointed, me or SuhO?

-_-

That one night i wanted to go the same club again and pretty much invited everybody i knew, there even was this cute one girl who was cs caster, so many people kept talking to me about her, at one time i even asked one guy who was talking about her "do u like her" and he was like " YEAH SURE who doesnt ?!!" so i decided to invite her to come too. The Koreans were suposed to come too but i couldnt get a hold of them.. somehow. Anyway that night was messed up, as we went downstairs we were gona go to the club but we got a phonecall from the Korean girl i had met earlier who went there and she said that there was no electricity at the club and it was closed tonight .. Downstairs was also NiP and Fnatic cs teams. We got downstairs and heard that they already left for the club ... we decided to follow to all meet in front of the club and see together where we would go next, we had like 6 cabs following each other driving us around trying to find another club .. We ended up in a fucking KTV and it didnt take me long before i left to go back to the hotel feeling extremely disapointed concerning this last night in QingDao :/

Sexy Counter-Strike caster!

I packed my stuff and got ready to go the airport, went there with Wiz/Grubby/SaSe and we flew to Beijing all together. As we arrived in Beijing we had to part ways with Wizard who had to wait a few hours before catching his next plane, so we hugged him 1 by 1 and said goodbye and parted ways.

Me/Grubby/SaSe and Matt from WEF went to the hotel WEF had booked for us, it was my first time in Beijing. We made it to contact xiaOt and agreed on meeting in the afternoon, went to our hotel where we took a nap of a few hours, xiaOt was suposed to arrive at our hotel at 5 but he arrived at 3, we were so damn smashed we asked him to sleep some more, he agreed and he ended up geting up last...! This hotel was quite ok, there was internet in our rooms.

I talked to some friends on MSN and particulary to Jason who lived in Beijing for a year i think and he told me about some good clubs. We wanted to get some more DVDs so we asked xiaOt to take us to a place where we could find some. We went with him to a mall .. and were pretty surprised because we had said that we wanna go to the "market" to buy dvds, in the mall we went into a supermarket in the dvds area... they had no copies ofcourse and this wasnt what we wanted, then we realised how huge the language barrier can be sometimes... from a market and dvd copies we had gone to a supermarket with normal dvds.

We just got out of here searchin for some food and on our way outside we saw a "TGI Friday's" restaurant! sign of wish it must have been, we directly agreed to go to eat there. We all took the ribs with fries it was so damn good ! During this dinner we talked alot about every player's salaries in Europe/Korea/China, talked about which one were the best, who was geting more than they deserved etc. I paid for xiaOt's food then as i hadnt seen him since WEG so it was kinda like a "thank you" gift for him:)

Time for more clubbing, we first went to MIX which was in front of another club named Vics
The music here was hiphop, at first i didnt think we would be drinking anything strong so we didnt take a table, just went to sit at the bar and had some tequila sunrise. But Grubby didnt like this club, dancing on hiphop is probably harder than dancing on trance where you can pretty much do anything , jump around and it'll look okay.

So we headed out to look for another club, got back on this street where there was like up to 6 clubs lined up next to each other, Babyface / Queen / somektv place / Angel / some other club, we stood in front of every club and tried to calculate which one was playing the best music that we would all agree on and we finally picked to go in Angel, but we first wanted to take a look inside to make sure there's many people etc, some girl waitress with a pretty sexy dress took me&SaSe inside as Grubby was talking about heading back to hotel, we took a look a liked it so we got a table, then went outside to see what was going on, WE.Tiger, his girlfriend and Hacker_Babysai had just arrived, we just went back inside and ordered some chiva's regal for our table.

Was boring to wait for the drinks so me and SaSe went straight the dancefloor once again, then went back to sit to drink a few cups of wishky. At one time SaSe went to the restroom and it took him like 20 min to come back so when he did i asked "where the fuck were u" and he said "in the hiphop area on the other side of the club" i didnt know there was one.. we went there to try it and well i dont know why but there is always more girls on the hiphop dancefloors somehow! At one time we were dancing and there was these 2 girls dancing next to us, they were quite gorgeous, some kid walked up to them and started to dance in front of em, i think those girls were around 22~24 and the kid prolly was like 16, so i thought wtf is he doing ?

These 2 girls were pretty tall like around 1m70~80ish and the kid was like 1m50, at one point one of the girls caught him by the arm and pointed at another girl behind them ( meaning like " go dance with her" ) which was 1m50 too hahaha, that cracked me up for so freakin long aswell as SaSe ... Later on we danced & talked some with these girls and got to know that this little boy was actually their little brother, shortly after they sadly had to leave to bring their brother home :(

Me and SaSe kept changing of dancefloors all the time while xiaOt Grubby and the other guys didnt dance much at all they were talking the whole time and sitting down at our table. Then suddenly as we were dancing Grubby came up to us and said he was gonna head back to the hotel so we said cya. We still danced some more and as we headed back to our table there was nobody here anymore, all these chinese guys had left too without saying goodbye! later in the night at like 3:30 SaSe wanted to try another club so we just went outside and tried to go to Babyface, there was almost nobody here it looked like it was going to close so SaSe said let's
get out of here, i said no let's try the dancefloor quickly, and as we reached it and started to dance some guys were forming a circle and in the middle some girl started to dance and pulled SaSe in to dance with her :D as they finished another girl went in and SaSe pushed me in to dance with her ... then this whole circle thing got dismissed and i danced with some different girls which i invited to sit down & have a drink later on we talked shortly, but the club was closing soon and she was with a whole bunch of friends of her here so she just left with em.

We decided to go back to MIX which wasnt next to these clubs so we took a cab to go here, it was pretty close still. It was still opened, and to get in we had to show our stamp on our wrists that they can only see with a special light, but there was a problem, we had been dancing for a few hours and sweating alot and we sweated out those stamps ... Mine was still a lil here so they let me in but SaSe's was completely gone so he had to pay again to enter hahahaha :D

As we got back in it was like 4am and there still was many people here and many girls! this club had many foreigners too while waiting for SaSe paying at the entrance i asked some guy where he was from cuz he was waiting for somebody too, he said "From France?"
i said "Vraiment ?" which means "Really?", he said "Ouais" ( Yeah ), then i said from what area r u from and he replied "the 11th" then i knew he probably was from Paris, only those cocky bastards answer with the number of their state/district when you ask them where they are located, like they think there only is Paris in France ! :D

Anyway we got back in for alot of dancing again, i had been drinking slowly compared to SaSe earlier but i decided to smash myself for my last hour, ordered some drinks which we drank in one shot all of em, the waitresses at the bar were looking at us like wtf is this alcoholics!

Danced some more and met some new girls, which happened to be Korean too ... ! Apparently im really attracted to Koreans. wherever i go i meet some of em! Talked for a while and figured that the girl SaSe was dancing with also my friend's friend, Before leaving i asked for her contact to perhaps meet again. I then had to head back to the hotel at around 5:30am to get rdy to leave to the airport, i was so dizzy, all i remember is a bunch of cab drivers talking to each other about the address of my hotel and seeming not to know it.

Angel Club

Mix Club

Babyface Club

Then some cab finally went like "OK OK, GO"
I just got into his cab not trying to ask any question as these guys dont speak a single word of english, then they all laughed so i understood that i prolly was going to driven around before finally reaching my hotel but not much i could do about it, looking outside of the window i felt very weird, the way things were lookin , i was thinking about all the fun i had and how much i was gona miss it.
I finally reached my hotel, kinda late tho we were suposed to leave at 6am and i was only ready at 6:30am, at this time SaSe had already come back from the club for a few minutes and he seemed drunk, we talked some random bs and i remember felling down on the floor at one time and i got a big wound right now cuz of this :/ finally i showered and packed all my stuff, said goodbye to my bro SaSe and went outside to catch our cab.

The traffic was pretty nice this morning not too many cars so we arrived at the airport pretty early checked-in then went to eat before flying out on seperate flights with Grubby.

I slept REALLY alot during this flight i was so tired from the night i had before, and when i didnt sleep i watched the end of final destination on my laptop and "running scared" which i thought was a very nice movie.

As i arrived in Paris i went straight for the train station in the airport. There was the count where you have to buy tickets there was these 2 asian girls who looked in trouble they came at the same count as me and as i heard them talking i directly recognized that they were speaking Korean =p
I had to take the RER ( it's like subway but for long distances trip ) to get to the train station in the center of Paris. the RER is known to be not so safe so i kinda had to hide my check of 2.500$ while walking around in it.

I reached the train station in Paris and had to wait for a short while before finally geting in and there it was another 4hours trip to finally reach my city. I had food in the train, they serve pretty ok stuff but it's damn expensive.

Finally reached my city&home where i've pretty much been lazy doin not much until now:D
Yesterday was the clanwar 4K vs NiP, i played on EI and met SouthSea, i lost the first map against that lil panda! and won the 2nd & 3rd rather easily.

Soon is 4K vs SK in wc3l~ i need to find the strenght & motivation to practice some more =)

Anyway that was my story from my last trip to China i hope you enjoyed it and will leave some comments about it!
During my travel i lost to cable to plug my camera to my computer.. so i cant use the few pictures i have on my camera right now, maybe i'll try to get a new cable later, for now i will just use some other pictures i took www.replays.net.

What i've been up to!

2006-07-27T17:16:44Z

Well ever since i got my motivation back i've been trying to be less lazy and play more =)

on 14-15-16th of July there was a LAN tournament in my town gathering around 400 players.
There was a WC3 Tournament in which many of the best French players signed up for, such as Sayen , eLqua, PhenX, FreD and Lege.

This was like the 3rd edition of this tournament which is like a BYOC ( bring your own computer ) I missed the 2 previous ones as i had some big tournaments to attend outside of France.
Whenever i signup for a French tournament it goes pretty badly, half of the players don't showup and the other half tries everything they can not to meet me before the final and those tours become real chaos. So .. as i know the organisers of this tour i talked to them and decided not to take part in the wc3 tournament so many people would still come. Instead i would be playing showgames, AND if anybody beat me they would win some prizes such as my own mousepad for example, and alot of other things.

There also was another showmatches thingy organised for Counter-Strike named Qtour. A player came from Sweden, his nickname is Quick, he won ESWC2003 in Poitiers with Team9, he's quite famous, rather good at cs and pretty humble, i got the opportunity to chat with him and he seemed to be pretty relaxed all the time and not nervous at all about his upcoming games.
He played against alot of challengers, all on them on aim_map and the first who reaches 10 frag wins, he won all of them but a few challengers managed to take a few frags from him, the max somebody reached was 9 then i think it was 6 ... the 4 that made the most frags vs him would then play against each other in a mini tournament to win a processor.

Quick & Me during a photoshoot for a local journal.

For my own showmatches, i didnt lose a single game and gave away alot of stuff to my opponents according to how good they did against me. The first day was Friday, no tournaments got played here and eLqua PhenX Sayen arrived this day, we played until late pretty much of anything wc3/dota/cs then headed back to my home where they all got to sleep at.
The 2nd day The warcraft III tournament started and went on slowly with only the groupstages played all the favorites advancing logically. Then at night we headed back to my home me/NoX/D4v1D/Sayen/eLqua/PhenX at around 5am when they had to be at the playing area the next morning at 11...

I decided that since i had so many friends at home it could be funny to joke some on webcam, i launched my webcam with some friends on MSN and my friends at my home started to do some crazy things , such as fighting in the background on my bed or making faces ..... :D
Then some of them went to bed in the next room and some others started to play cards on my bed so i couldnt sleep ! i used the computer some more then kicked them out telling them i want to sleep =D
The next morning waking up was too hard ... Everybody except me&Sayen managed still to get up have breakfast and leave to the tournament while me and Sayen slept some more. Later on my cellphone rang and we were requested to get up and head to the LAN's location.

eLqua/D4v1D/NoX playing tarrot on my bed

Me chilling

Me playing

Me & RoScO a famous french CS player

So we went there again. I had alot of challengers to play this day and played almost non-stop. While in the WC3 Tournament some major upset happened with NeD- beating Sayen, and Lege had beaten PhenX too earlier in the groups. PhenX met eLqua in 1/4 of the WB and knocked him out in the LB too. In the WB semi finals PhenX(OR) vs Lege(NE) were tied 1/1 and PhenX who had already lost to Lege in groupstages decided to go Elf vs Elf for the 3rd game and won =) In the other semi Fred(UD) beats NeD-(HU) clearly ( .... imba ! ) The WB Final was won by PhenX quite clearly and in the LB eLqua>Lege , but then FreD>eLqua ( bo1 but still major upset!! ) So FreD had to play against PhenX again and got smashed again =)
Final rankings 1. PhenX 2. FreD 3. eLqua
Everybody went home this same sunday after the tournament was over except FreD & Sayen who stayed 1 more night at my home before leaving the next day when they had their train.

After they left i pretty much got back to my daily routine, some games, alot of chatting =p
I've recently got to know some more very interesting people on MSN (they know who they are !)
And i been spending alot of time talking to them:)

On the 19th i got to play vs SaSe in Eurocup and lost rather badly, he played very well so it's no surprise that i lost and i'm happy for him and hope he will go far in this tournament.
Later on i decided to quit playing it as im rather tired of playing on either TM or GW in every bo3 and get almost like a 100% freelose on it and also because of the organisation which isnt that good at all. I always am ready for my official matches at least a few minutes before its going to start and i always end up starting to play 30min after the scheduled time.

On friday 21st 4Kings vs SK.Ger in NGL took place, i played first and won my 4 games in a row doing my 2nd allkill.
On Saturday 22nd Grubby won against mTw all by himself too.

All kill!

From there until now i been practicing some on my new acc which is http://www.battle.net/war3/ladder/w3xp-player-profile.aspx?Gateway=Northrend&PlayerName=ToD%5bPooh%5d on Northrend and also played a few games on http://www.battle.net/war3/ladder/w3xp-player-profile.aspx?Gateway=Northrend&PlayerName=Aremys
and http://www.battle.net/war3/ladder/w3xp-player-profile.aspx?Gateway=Northrend&PlayerName=GoingForHooters

Today is Thursday 27th and i went to the beach. It had been so long time i didnt go there and it was great! not many people since it's a weekday. It wasnt too sunny and there was some nice wind which made the air fresh and alot of nice waves!
I really had fun even tho i was swimming pretty much all by myself :D there was still a few people swimming too and at one time i started to get on the waves and did some body surfin on my stomach and people started to copy me ! !

Me at the beach

Me at the beach again

4kings Fighting !

view around the beach

view around the beach2

On my way back a mountain of Salt!

then i went back to home where i had received a new modem, i subscribed for a new broadband connection, 8MB instead of my old 512kb so it should be better for downloading and such now. Took a shower to wash out all the sand and salt then tried to make this thing work. It seems to be working right now as im online ;> im looking forward to see how powerful 8MB is later on.

after showerin!

My schedule will be pretty tight in the upcoming days with 4K vs SK.Int in NGL on Saturday 29th and also a French tournament with 100e cash to win this same one day.
On Sunday 30th i'll be going to Marseille for my nephew's birthday which i havent found a gift for yet =P

My nephew Kérân

On Monday 31st 4Kings vs WorldElite for the WC3L Playday1.
Then on Tuesday 1st i'll be leaving to Paris then to Beijing then to QingDao for the upcoming WEF tournament which sounds like a fun tournament. I was suposed to be practicing alot for this tournament but when i saw the map pool which includes TM&GW it kinda killed my motivation so i'm more taking it as a fun tour than something else, i hope i will be able to do some shopping, to visit as much as i can of the city and go to the beach with & club with Kim ! :D

Ill prolly write a report later about my experience in Qin Dao if i aint too lazy!

My Starswar III story

2006-07-13T02:50:50Z

Somebody named satineinsky made me wanna write at least 1 more article in here, this one is going to be about my experience in Xian playing StarsWar3.

First of all i'd like to mention that i was very eager to go to China again and take part in this tournament, i knew from a few weeks already that i would have to chose between Lanware in USA, Dreamhack in Sweden and Starswar in China and my choice had been easily done, even tho the WSVG events is where there was most money to win and WSVG is suposed to be important.

Ever since WEG ended my motivation had been quite low so i wanted to have fun and go to the tournament which sounded the most fun, and i thought Starswar would be it. So i accepted Starswar invitation and proposed to give my help to organise the qualifier for the team Europe as i wanted it to be ran well to ensure having the best players going to China to represent Europe

I asked all the players i thought had to play this but many of them declined, some of them for Dreamhack or Lanware, some of them because of school/job. In the end there still was 20 pretty good players ready to battle it out. Insomnia and Creolophus were planning on playing Dreamhack at first but i kind of convinced them to take part in this qualifier to have the opportunity to chose between the two tournaments in case they would qualify.. And also gave them my thoughts on how fun it would be, they ended up qualifying and going which is nice.

Zax asked me on MSN about the Europe lineup and i had no idea what to say, the system would be like , we give an order from 1 to 5 and so does the other teams then they reveals who plays who .. I organised a small meeting with the other players and i told them i dont care where they put me in the lineup, they talked with each other and in the end i ended up at the 5th place vs both Korea and China, later on i heard that i was gona have to play vs Sky & Lyn which i was pretty ok with, i would rather play Sky somewhere else than in China as practically everybody cheers for him when i play him in China it has almost become irritating but hey not much i can do about it.

A while after this i started preparing all my trips and booking stuff, somebody booked my trip to China on 15th of June and made a mistake by booking it from Paris instead of Marseille...
I live in the south of France, it's quite far from Paris, i ended up checking the fares for a flight Marseille=>Paris online but nothing would fit with the time i needed to arrive at, so i had to go by train and it took me 5hours to get there + 2 hours waiting in the airport instead of just 1hour going and 1hour waiting. I was pretty upset about it but what can i do .. shit happens.

I went to eat to a famous restaurant in France in the airport, called "hippopotamus", because my step brother usually works there as a cook and i was hoping to see him, but he wasnt here, it was in the morning and his work started in the afternoon, so i just ate, paid like 25e and left.

I took my flight to Shanghai and as i arrived there Wufan from replays.net staff was waiting for me, it was rather early in the morning and my next plane to Xian was scheduled to the afternoon. I asked where are the other players and Zax, he said they're all sleeping, the rest of the European team had already arrived earlier. he asked me what i wanna do and i just
wanted to chill some so i asked where can i use some internet, he brought me to his home , i checked some websites and as i was hungry i asked if we could go to eat. We went outside and in the morning there wasnt any decent restaurant opened .. i wanted to get some rice & meat but apparently they didnt have this anywhere ... So we went to a place where there already was a bunch of people and bought some stuff with mostly dumplings ... it was alright but i thought that it was only okay as a one time thing.

We headed back to his home and there i noticed that there was a playstation so i proposed to play some and we played like 2 soccer games of PES i think it was.
Then i took a nap and Wufan woke me up saying it's time to go to the airport. We went there by taxi, i changed some money like 260e to chinese money to make sure i'll have enough for the upcoming days. As i got out of the change office i saw the other players and went to greet them. We gathered our stuff and went to checkin. Almost everybody brought their laptop,
Grubby/DIDI8 so we started to watch some movies while waiting to board.. We watched the beginning of Aeon Flux with Grubby and Creo on Grubby's laptop =)

Then finally we boarded and flew to Xian, I was pretty upset about something i forgot home which is the powercable of my laptop ... meaning once i would run out of battery i wouldnt be able to use it anymore ... BUT !! luckily for me ownistch had a laptop too and of the same brand as me (Samsung!) ... meaning i could use his cable !=) We arrived in Xian it was pretty
late already. Some people were waiting with some cameras at the airport and recorded us arriving , i dont know why and who it was. We joked about how we like to be filmed after a flight ( it is pretty well known that you dont look in your best shape after flying )We had the casual bus ride to our hotel which was FREAKIN NICE ! 4 stars i think, i got to room with ownitsch, Grubby with Creo, DIDI with Inso. Went to my room to rest, and got to meet JacziE and Jason later on who had just arrived:)
Got to meet the chinese team too, i went to greet Fly100% and thanked him for his help and the practice he gave me during WEG. I realised xiaOt wasnt going to be here and it saddened him as he's like my lil brother =[ i missed him !
In the evening we went to the Stadium where we were going to play to know where it is, it was like 5min walk to get there from our hotel.

I went to sleep shortly after, then the next day someone had told me that the breakfast was ending at 9 so i woke up at 8h30 to go to breakfast right away, went there and to my surprise i was the only player here ... ? i ate breakfast and asked when does it finish and they told me at 10 ! ! T_T

Went back to my room to shower and get ready to go to the playing area. Cant remember who i went there with.
The first match was Europe vs Korea, Starting off with Check vs Grubby on Echo Isle. In this kind of tournament there usually are alot of bets going on between players, i asked Sweet if he wanted to bet right away, and said i'll bet on Grubby, he said "no no me bet Grubby" so .. no bet for now i guess. Then in mid game Check put blademaster really low hp and was doing pretty good and i reasked... bet ? this time he accepted ... Somehow Grubby managed to win this quite clearly and i won some money with this first match i bet on !

Then .. Sweet had to play DIDI and he didnt have headphones just like always so i loaned him mine ... This is far from the first time that this happened i dont know why he doesnt bring his headphones every time and that was the case for some other

koreans too .. During the whole tournament there almost always was somebody using my headphones =P
While Sweet was playing DIDI i asked Check if he wanted to practice with me on one of the computers reserved for press to get some practice for the upcoming ESWC/WC3L we played 2 games and figured it was too hard to play with the setup and stopped.

I bet some money on Insomnia who lost a very sad game :( Then Creo won pretty convincingly vs Rainbow on TurtleRock, and i had to play Lyn as 5th game. When the game started i realised that i didnt feel comfortable with the setup and was rather having a hard time controling my units .. but was trying to manage still, i ended up winning after countering his towerpush.
But i didnt feel satisfied with my game and i felt like he played very far from his real level too for some reason. Then Sweet beat Grubby and Creo beat ReiGn, i had to play Sweet, we ended up playing on EchoIsle which i thought was quite ok for me. I felt better than in the previous game regarding the setup. My sensi was working better, i handled his harass quite well and got archmage lvl 2 was DK with 0 xp, then tried to expo tier2 he slowed it down, massed some destros , attacked and finished me , just like a good old Human vs Undead game.

There was alot of break between the games, and at one of them we played some game which seem kinda hard to explain .. we had to immitate something or somebody and have the next player guess what it is ...
But i think SuhO messed it up and as punishment had to sing in front of everyone =)

eventually Creo won against Sweet in a pretty long game then vs Lyn and brought the victory to team Europe. China vs Korea began this evening and we ( the europe team ) left during the beginning of this match, as we didnt particulary wanna watch it
and prefered just going back to the hotel to watch some show on DIDI's laptop in my/inso/didi's case =p

Later on we went to eat all together in some traditionnal restaurant, me and Inso always like to eat some good meat so we were really looking forward to this, but we ended up geting only dumplings at our table and we realised that we were starting to get quite sick of this ... i complained some about the food .. i asked a bunch of times to get some rice or something more
"casual" than always dumplings but didnt get any.

During the dinner the chinese team left, we thought they went back to the hotel to rest but we heard later on that they went to an internet cafe to practice ... which we were rather surprised by.
We went back to our big bus just outside and waited here in the heat for like 30min ... without really knowing why. Then finally it seemed like we could go , we went inside the bus where the heat was deadly ... i was very sweaty the temperature must have been like 45°c inside .. we waited here at least 30min wondering why it was like this ... And joking around how the chinese were trying to mess us up so we lose to them the day after. Finally we got to head back to our hotel and went to sleep.

The next morning woke up again rather early and went to breakfast with ownistch, Inso & DIDI were already here ... And the woman at the count was telling us to go somewhere ... "chinese restaurant" she was saying , i was like .. wtf i aint going to no chinese restaurant it's here im going to have my breakfast at.
I saw some replays.net staff around and asked them to sort this with the language barrier etc. They explained me that they got a deal with a chinese restaurant just nearby and its here we had to go take our breakfast, ownistch was saying that he went there the day before and it was pretty bad so i said no way.. I wanna have breakfast here, after negotiating for a while we ended up having our breakfast where we wanted, with Inso & DIDI. Then headed to the stadium to watch the games and have some fun with the other players. Korea barely won vs China.

Then Europe had to play China and we didnt do any good at all .. it seemed like every one of us was playing far worse than we usually do .. Grubby lost to Guangmo, Creo lost to SuhO, Inso beat Fly, DIDI beat Tiger, then came my game vs Sky, I talked alot with him before playing and he kept talking about how he was gona use Panda, i said ok then i'll use Panda too .. but he didnt want me to .. so i said ok i'll just use MK then ..
In WEG we played with the same configuration at the gaming area as at the hotel so i didnt need to warmup much to be sure the setup is ok .. I did the mistake not to warmup much here .. and as the game started i felt like i couldnt play very well, my sensi was messed up very badly i was scared to fight because of this. And during the countdown of the game Sky said "panda :) ... and tower rush :)" Then i wondered .. why is he saying this ? trying to scare me .. ? i know he loves tower rush.. i ended up making 2 towers in my main changing one of them to guard tower, and played on the defensive just because i was scared of his tower rush ... He only crept and made units which i found pretty lame, im the kind of person who would never try to make his opponent playing bad or worse by saying or doing something before a match , and i think that's what happened here.

Anyway the game went rather badly for me i couldnt move my units like i wanted to .. I Even used a scroll of beast by mistake with a missclik when i was in the middle of the map just walking there ... I couldnt staff any unit either because it require good control and the cursor just wasnt moving like i wanted it too , i ended up staffing a unit every minute while i had alot of red ones after his breath of fire use. Then in the last fight it was so obvious i couldnt win, i just did attack move and lost everything said gg and left.

I was pretty disapointed, it had been long time i hadnt felt like i couldnt play good at all in a tournament... but i thought this is not important match, where it is going to matters will be at ESWC.
Anyway .. to my big surprise Inso lost to Guangmo ! Then DIDI beat SUhO but lost to Sky.
Grubby had to re-play Guangmo and this time we decided not to start until Grubby would feel very comfortable with the setup .. We tried alot of stuff mouse fix, changing the hertz frequency of the screen but still he wasnt feeling good using his mouse .. we tried to fix it for some time then he said it was better but far from perfect and decided to just play like this because many people were waiting .. he played and really struggled to win this game ... then he had to face Sky and hope wasnt very high, he played again far from his real level and lost quite heavily meaning we finish 2nd and China 1st. We were rather disapointed especially knowing that we could have played alot better than this, and if we scored 1 more map we would
be first.. =p

Leaving back to our hotel was a real mission so many fans were waiting outside to get a signature or a picture .. We had to wait in the VIP room all together before going back to the hotel, during this time we kept on joking and made some fun fights

too =P then finally we got to go back to the hotel where we chilled some before going to eat all together to a Korean Restaurant !! had been long time i didnt eat Korean but Korean equals meat!! me and Inso were very happy we ordered so much meat ... we were really full when we stopped eating =p

Then we headed to a club all together, i was really looking forward to it, hadnt gone to club since last time in Hangzhou during weg, In Korea before i never got to hang out much with Lyn/Rainbow/ReiGn too so it was a good opportunity now.
The club was pretty nice, we got like 2 tables with alot of sits around em, we first talked and drank some, im not suposed to drink alcohol but drank a few glasses still. Then we finally went to hit the dancefloor all together, it was really crowded

.. so many people and very hot made us all sweaty, i was all covered with sweat my shirt was all wet .. we went back to sit some and waited until later when they would be less people on the dancefloor to go again .. And this time it was CRAZY , there was like a stage at each corner of the dancefloor with some people dancing on it ... and at one time i looked at one of them and Grubby was on it !! in the two next seconds i had already rejoined him and more people followed, we ended up fulfilling one of those stage with all SW players and some staff ~ then since there was not much space left i asked Grubby if he wants to go to the other corner so we went there, the stages were like 50cm up from the dancefloor , so here we were ... Dancing on the stages at each end of the dancefloor raising our hands and having fun.

Then we just went back in the middle of the dancefloor and i saw Jason dancing with a girl who was with 2 of her friends and he talked to them in chinese some ... I went to dance with one of those girls and started talking to her, i asked her if she wants to take a break and sit down and so did we. Aswell as her friend and Jason. We talked for a while then i think it was at around 2am everyone went back to the hotel but except me/Inso/Jason who stayed with those 3 girls, the club was closing shortly after, so we found another place to go to, like a Karaoke a room where there is a TV a computer with internet a table
to eat etc .. was pretty good, we watched the soccer game France/Korea there, we stayed here until around 7am before heading back to our hotel..

I slept a few hours then got waken up by the phone ( thx to ownistch who never wakes up no matter what is making noise doorbell/phone/alarm !! ) i answered it, it was Zax asking us to get ready to go to the mountain .. I was like .. I only had 2 hours of sleep man i cant go there .. I wanna stay here. He said he will fix things and i can sleep .. So i slept until the afternoon, when i woke up everyone was gone, except for JacziE and Jason, Jason was going to leave in the evening and JacziE the day after, we went to eat in the center of the city at a Pizza hut ( IT OWNS in china !! ) then came back to the hotel, Jason had to leave right away.

I phonecalled the girl i met earlier, her name is Celia by the way and she came to meet me. We went to like .. a big plaza with an old chinese tower, where there was TONS of people and like a water show ... water coming outa the ground with alot of lights of every color ... And many people mostly young ones were trying to run between the water shots and ended up all wet ! it was pretty nice and there really was MANY people there, unluckily i forgot to take my camera and Celia too .. But there was some photographers around and we paid one of them to take one picture of us ... Then we went to a massage shop and got like a feet +body massage it was pretty good.

The day after JacziE had to leave early, i went to eat with her before though then she left and i waited for the other

players who came later, they all took a shower before we left to the airport to fly to Shanghai, We flew to Shanghai and went to another hotel, the way we roomed was the same as in Shanghai.
The next morning when i woke up Grubby/Creo had already left the hotel, and DIDI/Inso were about to leave:) I said goodbye to them then i went to eat with ownistch. It was really though to order in this restaurant as nobody could speak english ... we ended up pointing random things in chinese on the menu and they served us some good things and some less good ones (like frog it was i think)
We then headed back to our hotel where there was wireless internet. I went on MSN and tried to reach somebody from replays.net staff and finally made it, i told them i wanna go to IGE office and perhaps visit some stuff in Shanghai along with ownitsch since it was his first time there. I also asked vivian to come =)

So wufan brougt us to the IGE office where i practiced a bunch of games vs yiyun fly100% and some other guys.
Then vivian came and we had to decide where to go. ownistch had never been here so we got to go the XianYang Market, it was my 3rd time here!

We bought some stuff then went to like .. nearby the river where the view is great and took alot of pictures while walking all the way along the river.

Then we went to like .. an old temple which i forgot the name of, and ate in a restaurant here ( more dumplings T_T )

Just headed back to IGE office to gather my stuff that i had left here, went back to the hotel to sleep.
The next morning i left to the airport with Sky SuhO King Zax and ownistch, we were gona have the same flight to Germany to go to wc3l playoffs.
But that's another story!

Overall i would say this trip was as always alot of fun, maybe it could have been better, as the games didnt go very well and i felt disapointed in myself for adapting so badly to the playing conditions.
Thx to Zax and the whole replays.net Staff for making such an event, theres much improvement needed for next edition though =)
I hope you enjoyed reading my story, this is also my first time to use pictures in the blog .. so it may not look very good or well positioned, but if i ever happen to write another entry it'll prolly be better, feel free to leave me any advice regarding this matter =)

Motivated again!

2006-07-09T00:30:17Z

It's time to OoooownnNNNnn!

WEG Story Part 2, From after Sky to Grubby~

2006-05-23T09:23:35Z

I can't exactly remember what happened next i think we got back to the hotel and were suposed to go to club, but we ended up being REALLY tired so we didnt go ...
As i saw Zacard he asked me if i won vs Sky, i said no .. i lost 0/3 ... and made a sad face .. he looked at me sadly then i said JK i won 3/0 , he congratulated me and seemed to be happy about it.
I went to sleep early but was still sick and always very thirsty.... that's one feeling i can clearly remember about my stay in China, the weather was really dry and i always was thirsty.. and as we didnt have any fridge in our room i never had any cold water so i wasnt drinking much....

I was also pretty surprised at the fact that we had really hard time finding a restaurant that could provide us with ice for our drinks ... i kept making some jokes about opening my own ice company in china and becoming a millionaire :)
As i had hard time falling back asleep again, i got up a few times and got something to drink ... the next morning i had to wake up VERY EARLY to go to some kind of embassy to renew my visa cuz it was going to expire... was kinda mad about this ..

only me and JacziE had to do it cuz we arrived earlier than everybody .. Had so hard time geting up and going outside ... the weather was really hot this day which made it harder, when you're extremely tired you dont wanna get up and go do some paperwork for your visa in such a sunny day...
Anyway i got downstairs aswell as JacziE, KEN from weg staff and somebody from our hotel's staff which i kept wondering on why the hell is he going with us ...We tried to get a taxi for so long ... it was rush hour and all taxi were already in use, traffic was looking terrible ... i started to get mad and complaining ... the guy from the staff went back into the hotel and i got quite angry and asked why the hell is he going back ,it's not like we hadnt waited enough outside already without finding a taxi .. if we find one now he wont be here to take it with us ...
I went back inside the hotel and asked at the receiption where this guy just went .. they didnt understand ofc and just looked at me weirdly .. shortly after he came back and we went outside again and couldnt find a taxi still ..
Started to be long just to get a damn taxi ... i got mad and said "FUCK IT , let's just go back to sleep, if we dont get a taxi soon i'm just gona go back to sleep, dont care about this damn visa"

Then miss JacziE had to handle things and make me stay, KEN said something like "we're very lucky for this season of WEG to have you handling ToD, you're the only one who can do that" which made me smile cuz i knew it was partly true, i know i complain alot!

We finally got one damn taxi after using some imba strategy, both KEN and the guy from the hotel's staff went to one corner of the street to double our chances to find a taxi ! we drove to the place we had to go to which was like 20min away, luckily i had my psp to listen to some music and i got to sing some with JacziE in the car which made the guy from the hotel's staff smile alot, just looking at us singing together :P
As we got here we walked into some building and somebody said it's not here, i asked why is it not here and someone said, because here is for domestic issues we have to go the foreign area which was just like 3min walk away so that was ok ...
During the walk i asked KEN why is this guy from the hotel's staff going with us, and he explained me that if we stay longer that our visa allow us to, and in this hotel we will both get fined, and the rate will be pretty high so the hotel's administration really doesnt want that.
There wasnt many people at this place luckily so we didnt get to wait much before starting to fill papers with our informations but something was missing ... ID pictures!! so we had to go out again and make some in shop photo shop which didnt take really long.... Got back at the main place added our pictures and finally gave em all the papers required to extend our visa. We finally went back and i think we first ate with JacziE and the western food restaurant before going back to hotel where i rested more....

As i got up in the afternoon this day was filled with boringness/lazyness, i didnt feel like practicing or doing anything, i just chatted the whole day while and didnt do anything special except at night when some people had previously mentioned that they wanted to go to a massage ! We talked about who wanna go and that was me/Zacard/Sweet/Jaczie/Grubby but in the end Grubby didnt get to go .. so we went all the 4 of us but Zacard forgot something at the hotel so he had to go back , we walked here me/Sweet/JacziE, we had previously agreed that this one would be my treat for being in final..
As we walked into the place there were like 3 attendants who started talking to Sweet/JacziE in chinese as they look asian ..

they tried to explain that they cant speak chinese ... then we just waited on a sofa for Zacard, some girl came and asked "what are you guys looking for?" we said that we're coming for a massage and we're waiting for a friend.As soon as Zacard arrived things got shaped up, he started screaming "MASAGI!!" and being crazy funny as usual, Sweet and Zacard had already tried this place earlier so they already had the classical massage and decided for this time to have another one... a "feet massage" we said ok me and JacziE will take the normal one... they went in a room , us in another, as the massage started i started talking with JacziE while looking at the roof and we talked for the whole time which was like 1H, i was pretty sleepy in the end and that girl working on me seemed to be damn tired, i dont think she often had to work on somebody as tall as me.. :P we ended before Zacard/Sweet and we didnt know how to find them so we just walked around the place until we saw their shoes outside of a room in front of the door, we knocked and walked in , they both were siting like 2 pimps on long chairs, Zacard was asleep while the girl was still workin on him .. we chatted some with Sweet then suddenly Zacard suddenly moved up and screamed "BOUH! ! !" the girl who was workin on him got scared so much that she didnt move for the next minute haha :D
after this i paid , we left and went back to the hotel and i wanted to practice some.. I played like 3 games vs BerA who's one of the players who helped me alot during my stay in China, i'm really grateful for that i'll have to treat him when we meet at next wc3l playoffs i guess.

I wanted to get some more practice but Zacard was not around .. i heard something like he went to club...
I hadnt played a single game vs him since i knew i was gona play against Grubby in final which isnt really logical to me as we're rooming together...
I played a whole bunch of games against Moon too earlier this day , and again at night ... but i needed to get some practice vs Orc so i asked many people to help me find some opponents... Sky was very kind and helped me alot, he found me an opponent named Fly100% and helped me install CGA which is like a private server for chinese people, it took a while but he seemed to really wanna help .. I finally played a few games vs this unknown orc player which was actually pretty good...
(one of our game on TM was uploaded by somebody on RNET) and i went to sleep after this.During the night, Zacard who went to club earlier and who was leaving today came back in the room turned the lights on and
started packing his stuff ... it was really loud , i couldnt sleep anymore ... i got quite mad and i was also sad and thinking that he prolly doesnt care about me being in final if he's that careless about my rest ... but in the same time i cant blame him , he lost in first groupstage and it doesnt feel good .. all he wanted was to have fun for his last night ...;
I remember geting up and saying something like " couldnt you do this earlier ? i have a final today ...", he didnt say anything, finished packing and left the room until he would have to leave for real.. his luggage was still in ...
Later on he came back in to pickup his luggage, i told him bye and told him to go and say goodbye to JacziE even if he has to wake her up .. !

Finally the game time day came ... We went to the gaming area in the bus me/JacziE/Grubby/Sky, Moon was a little late so we left without him .... in the bus many jokes flew around.... we had good fun along with Sky~
As we arrived at the stadium we got in quickly before geting surrounded by fans... started to chill.. was pretty boring .. we started to setup asap ... it only takes me like 3~5min nowadays to be fully ready for a match ... I just plug in my keyboard/mouse/headset/usbstick, copy my customkey file in wc3 folder.. change language of keyboard into french .. remove actual mousedrivers, install my own.. reboot, set my sensi ... start wc3 , activate customkey , turn off music sound, go to LAN , host a game vs computer on any map, try if my customkeys work and if the sensi is good for 10seconds, then if its good ( it usually always is unless big hardware problem like in USA )im rdy.

I knew that for this match the audience would probably cheer more for Grubby than for me, as he's like SUPERFAMOUS in China and his fanbase is probably much bigger than mine .. so i was prepared for it.
My match against Grubby started on TerenasStand, i lost last time twice in SEC on it, i didnt really know what to expect, he made something new to me, geting mercs with orc, i had never seen it , it was pretty ok but i handled it well i think, not losing much .. but then we added second heroes and fought in the middle it didnt go very well for me , i lost my mk and had to tp my mage ... but as he went for barack/lodge i figured he would have no anti air and went for 2 aviaries and mass gryphyn ... He attacked me later on and tried to tower, i already had a couple of gryphyns, won this fight clearly, he had to run away ... then i attacked his burrows and killed nearly all of them before tping .. that game was over unless i did a huge mistake ... i crept some knowing he was going to attack me really soon since it was now his only chance ... i fought and won clearly this one.

Starting with 1/0 is always good, but i have lost so many times vs Grubby before, even when i won the first game ... I tried to forget about winning the first game and only focus on the 2nd one which was going to be on TurtleRock.
I Spawned top left and he top right ... Many people says that TurtleRock is good for Hu vs Orc, i dont know if i agree with this but i agree that on close pos its very hard for orc... I went for a pretty unconventional creeping route, i first rush my small ogre spot and found lightningshield there, while he stole my small turtle spot and went to his own .. I got lvl 2 before him while he was 5xp from his lvl 2 but he killed a WE and got lvl2 then killed a footman .. i pulled back, hired a beastmaster and ran into his base ... he was gona creeping a big turtle spot near my base so i took down a burrow quickly before pulling back .. killing this burrow was very important , he was at 31/30 population and i was geting casters, he had only grunts/heroes, i had a huge advantage at this time i attacked again but he counter attacked me as he couldnt fight me ... i put up 2 scout towers in his base earlier, i ran back to my base and made him tp after he murdered a bunch of paesants.. , i attacked again while he sent 2 wyvern to harass my peons .... and killed a few burrows, this time he had to fight and took the fight which i won ... 2/0 !!

Third game on TwistedMeadows, my most hated map in this tournament by far... He played with Blade this time, and had a pretty good mid game, then in the late game he beat me pretty much like he beat Sky, with an expansion and much more units.

Fourth game was on EchoIsle which is one of my fav map, i made a classical start with some creeping while he came to harass me right away, i got to lvl when he was still lvl 1 with 0 xp, added a beast 2nd while my am was almost lvl 3 while his fs wasnt lvl 2 yet, and harassing my base~ i went to his base to try to cancel some building but came in too late as he already had 2 lodges .. i sniped a burrow again ! before tping , he had 29 pop on 30 !! i got up to 40 pop including a few casters, and towered attacked again .. 3/1 !! ~

I felt relieved and he typed "gg gratz", finally won a major tournament after so much practice and hard work ... i felt like it was well deserved even tho i know i got pretty lucky with the groupstage ties thingie... We went on the stage and thanked the audience for their support as Grubby seemed pretty happy for me ... I didnt show too much of my happiness as i'm not sure if it's really nice for my opponent ... I remember a few times when i lost to Grubby i felt bad .. like in SEC i was quite disapointed ,i kept thinking about how i would like to be #1 and be the one who's happy .. then during the ceremony he jumped and showed his happiness after we received our check and medals, he was the winner, the superstar ... and me the eternal 2nd !!!

When i was in Korea i once watched the final of a league where BoxeR lost 2/3 to his "student" iloveoov ... BoxeR started crying as he lost ... iloveoov felt bad and couldnt show any sign of happiness, as one of his best friends was crying for losing against him... but even tho BoxeR felt bad for losing he tried to be happy for his friend and while crying he smiled at his friend and put his arm on his shoulder ... then iloveoov smiled too ... it was very representative of their feelings and ... sad and happy in the same time, for me and Grubby, we have met many times i think it's pretty much the same thing but maybe without the tears... I cant be angry at him for showing his happiness whenever he beats me.. it's like a normal thing .. but a normal thing that i dont think i would do.
From one side not showing your happiness could be insulting for my opponent ... like if i considered that its purely normal to have beaten him.. but from another, there's what i just explained previously .. :P

So then came the ceremony, everyone got on the stage but before had to go in KEN asked me to dance while enterin as i won .. i considered it .. but i dont think im good enough at dancing so i said no ! so he asked me to do something special, something like a "move"... i thought about it and couldnt imagine anything special i could do but as my music started i entered the stage while jumping and with my fingers in the air haha ... i think the audience found it funny and so did the WEG staff..:)

We got our check/flowers, took alot of pictures and that was it .. i had to do a couple of interviews ... i was asked things like what do you think about winning this tournament , i said that i was pretty sad that one of us (Me/Grubby) had to lose today as i believed that both of us deserved to win this tournament ... but overall it was not so bad since we got #1 and #2... while doing those interviews some guys started packing up things right away ... The event was clearly over .. and the doors of the stadium were opened everywhere .. some fans started gathering all around the place during my interview ... there
were so many of them....
They waited long time just hoping for an autograph or a picture so i decided to make them happy, i went outside and shortly got surrounded by really alot of people.. i started to sign autographs but it was really hard , there was no space .. ! so many people ... i made so many signatures that my arm started to hurt badly.... in the end. I was surpised that some guys wanted me to sign their shirt as it seemed to be like coton shirts or something .. I even had to sign 2 purses of 2 girls which surprised me even more ... I most signed posters... In the end i could barely read what i was writing anymore as my hand was hurting so much .. ! KEN came and told me to get into the bus so i did .. didnt have time to take pictures with the fans but they nearly all got an autograph so its not so bad .. i waited for a while inside until the other players rejoined me and we headed to a restaurant pretty close to the stadium...

We started ordering food .. but as we were waiting for it .. i drank some beer even tho i didnt want to and started to feel really bad again ... I had to leave and go back to the hotel by myself which kinda saddened me cuz all the others were having a meal together and we didnt have much time left to spend together ... as i arrived at the hotel i slept a few hours and rested .... Some noise in the hotel's hall woke up me up ,i could hear people talking loudly " WE GOING TO KARAOKE", i got up and checked what was going on , everyone seemed to be already gone and i understood that they were going to a KTV...
I tried to find somebody i know around to go with them but couldnt find anyone ... Except Sky who was in his room .. and Snow on MSN, i asked if they wanted to go .. but i wanted to eat before .. they both said ok .. we went to the western food restaurant and on the way Sky decided that he wasnt hungry so he went to the KTV alone right away while i went to the restaurant with Snow to have some food .. i ate then we headed to the KTV where everyone was ..! as i got into the room where everyone was , Craven from readmore.de had the mic and started screaming like "WEG 2006 CHAMPION!!!! 4KKkkkkkk TODDDDDDDDDDDDD" and many people screamed .. i checked both tables which were like covered with beers .. Everyone seemed to be quite fresh in here ! they wanted to make me sing but i wasnt really in for that ... then many people left as it was late

.. we were only few left here so i decided to sing some ... then I COULDNT STOP anymore, i kept on singing and singing with Grubby, we did all the classic, all the britney spears ... etc. Grubby was maybe a lil drunk so he was doing much better than me .. Craven was pretty good .. after a while we went outside and were suposed to go back to the hotel until somebody proposed to go to SOS ( nightclub ), after a while a few people agreed to go, that was like me/Grubby/vesslan and a swedish guy which i forgot the name of...
We went there and had some fun .. but not for long then went back to the hotel and slept ...The day after JacziE left in the morning to Shanghai with some american guys, NO MORE ZACARD ... NO MORE JACZIE ... THE

TRIPLE IS BROKEN !! i was so sad !:(
for my last day in China i went to SOS ( again ) ... so me and Grubby tried to gather as many people as we could to go there together ... at the restaurant we got to know more a girl from the WEG staff who was named Jolie, she was from malaysia but living in China.. She agreed to come along with 2 of her friends. We gathered in the hotel later on and were gonna go to head to the club as we walked in front of the chinese restaurant nearby the hotel just before geting a taxi ... the whole WEG staff was eating here... I asked a few of them to come ... CAN refused :( but AMI accepted surprisingly~ vesslan went with us again and he was so damn funny this one night .. he had like some mini-pink-gun that could shot bubble and a charger full of soap and he was saying stuff like "guys, if you like girls ... stay close to me" or "i got it covered guys." with his very serious sunglasses.

As we got here, one of the manager Angel saw us and came to us, we asked if we could get a table ... she said ok but it was expensive this one night i paid like 200y, Grubby 200y, and Vesslan smtg like 800y .... -_- cuz we didnt wanna ask for money to the Koreans. I talked to AMI most of the time while Grubby was talking to Jolie, we went to dance a couple of time and had fun .. :) I previously wrote about those girls dancer who dance over the dancefloor and work here .. Well vesslan knew some of them and brought em to our table .. ~
He also knew one of the managers of the club but one that i had never seen before, who was more like ... into special substances. He got us some stuff to smoke, i smoked along with Grubby and vesslan, it was not bad quality... more dancing, a few more drinking and we finally headed back to hotel .. but before leaving we couldnt find vesslan anymore ... last we had seen him he was looking pretty badly fucked up so we were worried but there is nothing we could do .. we just left without him ... Went back to hotel .. I said goodbye to AMI as she was going to sleep and me too and i went to bed ... the next morning had to wakeup early to take our bus for the airport... We went there with a few Europeans guy from the staff, 2 swedish and a finnish guy, they were pretty cool during the whole event so it was nice. The bus ride to the airport was quite boring and long .. and this bus was old, going up & down all the time it was pretty rough :P

We got the airport said bye to the staff guys who had to catch their plane asap , i went to get some food with Grubby.. Then went to catch our flight to Amsterdam... we had sit far from each other so we didnt get to talk during the flight , but it didnt matter as i slept most of the time.. As we arrived in Amsterdam Grubby went home right away while i had to wait a few hours before catching my flight going to Marseille,France .... I was pretty damn bored during this time .. thx to vivian and few other friends for entertaining me on MSN while i had to wait .. :P i finally flew home and got home and it felt great ..
What happens next has already been told previously :)

Overall WEG was a quite great experience i would say and im seriously considering taking part into the next season.. I'm missing all the people i had fun with right now and i hope to meet em again soon ~

ps: IS THIS A HUGE ENOUGH ENTRY FOR U JACZIE ? DAMN U.

pps: thx to Doso for making me starting to write this, i finally feel like i took something heavy off my shoulders as i knew i was gonna have to do it soon anyway.

This is ToD4K Signing off! hope you enjoyed the read =) give some feedback in comments~

Bored and lazyyyy

2006-05-23T05:01:47Z

Anyway ... been bored lately, laddered some on aREMYS and JoeDaeHuy ( with orc ) and i was quite astonished at the amount of people laming, it's mostly shittalking, at one time i was counting the streak of games where my opponents just wouldnt say gg when losing and flame instead and it went up to something like 15 games, then i went to sleep ....
After a while geting flamed wether i won or lost i started to do the same -_- .. couldnt help it! but now im trying to be quiet .... it's quite hard to behave when some retard is talking crap in a ladder game, so easy to just flame him :)

Yesterday i played an ENC clanwar, France vs Denmark, we got a pretty nice lineup and won 5/0, Denmark were very mannered and let us replace chobo with myself since the damn rat didnt showup ~ My solo went pretty ok, i won the first map on Maelstrom quite quickly, but then Ciara whined a little about hu .. T,T and said i can chose the next map since he cant win anywhere .. -_- i know he's good on TM and he likes it so i picked it and lost HEHE .... :D
I was a little mad after this but it didnt matter so much, i picked EchoIsle as last map took expo, i made a few mistakes but expo solved :P
It was a fun clanwar overall without any major problem, had been a while i didnt have fun in a clanwar like this ... thumbs up for Ciara/Rholle/QuiSh !:)

Today there is the PayCheckarena tournament for which im signed up for~
then tomorrow 4K vs srs in NGL
after tomorrow i play Icest0rm in Eurocup Clanbase
and this weekend 27/28th i have my ESWC qualifier near paris :)

anyway my last entry only got 11 comments, WTF IS THIS !! wake up people if you wanna read more you gotta give some feedback .... !!!~

WEG story, From rematches to Sky

2006-05-19T05:40:53Z

Hi!
Im having an insomnia right now, so i decided it could be a good time to write my WEG story heh ?!
My last entry ended on the 28th of April at 6:21pm, as most of you know alot of stuff happened after this :P

this one day i wasnt feeling very good, but as i finished writing the entry on my blog, i picked up my stuff and left to the arena by taxi. This one taxi was driving hella fast, he scared the shit out of me!! he was trying to race on the highway or something, going left & right between cars! As i arrived to the arena i was told Grubby won 2/0...
I was happy for him, but sad for Zacard who is a good friend..

Honestly i was rooming with Zacard and im convinced that hes so much better than what he played in the LIVE games... I lost so many practice games vs him, i was so sure he would advance from the groupstages but i dont know, it seemed that he couldnt play at his real level while playing live , sadly.
Anyway GoStop now had to play xiaOt, and he won the first game rather convincigly which was on TM, xiaOt seemed to appreciate TM in practice he kept joking around about how he liked to use sapers+speedscroll so i thought he would have good chances but after seing this game i thought he was probably going to lose 0/2....

WEG said my plane ticket was already booked, to the next day ... in a normal context i would be sad to be leaving so early, but as i was ill all i wanted was to go home to rest as fast as possible ... So let's say i was rather happy about going home this early.
Anyway xiaOt managed to win on EchoIsle then came TurtleRock which is suposed to be good for Undead ( or so i hear ) where xiaOt won again ...
I was rather surprised and perhaps a little upset about having to play, maybe i didnt realise the chance i was geting...

As i entered the stage the chinese audience in Hangzhou gave me a really warm welcome which kinda cheered me up and made me wanna play good for them ~
I had to face xiaOt on EchoIsle, the map i lost on last time ... I consider i played quite terrible last time so i wasnt very worried .. I thought i had good chances for this match... I played much differently than last time, trying an expansion t2 with a MK... He played pretty nice in midgame .. still broke into my army and sniped my heroes, i thought it was looking difficult for me at this time until he tried to tower attack me and it went pretty bad for him ...
His shadowhunter was far from his army, i bolt-surrounded and killed it right away.. then i was just geting too many units from my expansion and i logically overcame.
During this match the audience was cheering quite loudly which was enjoyable, but they were mostly cheering for xiaOt which is understandable as hes chinese.

As i had to play vs GoStop i wasnt very excited about it and also not feeling very good either in my stomach .... But during the games somehow the pain almost completely got away ... i managed to forget about it and to focus only on the game i was playing, i dont know how i did this but i did it... my capacity to focus on game has dramatically improved during this tournament ... I prepared myself mentally to face nearly anything, Almost nothing could bother me while i was playing, except

maybe the loud cast which i had to ask everytime to sound down ~
The game started on TR, and surprisingly a huge majority of the audience was cheering for me !!
You would think that they could cheer for GoStop to hope for some more regames that could make xiaOt advance .. but no, that's what i like with the chinese fans.. they know the game and they know how difficult Human vs Undead is which is, i

believe, why they wanted me to win this ...
I played a pretty long game with many nice moves and some less nice ones ( dropping my staff )
In the end i managed to kill his DK somehow and realised i just qualified for the semi finals....
I raised my fists in the air as a sign of victory ... I was REALLY happy , i went to shake GoStop's hand then had to do an

interview...

I was asked about my expectations in the semi-final and how do i feel about playing Sky again.
I said that as i mentioned before, Sky is the player i wanted to play the most against in this tournament... As i have never beaten him before and he beat me a few times during important tournaments so i was happy to get to meet him again and this time i would be ready to face him.
I remember i had a discussion with Grubby earlier during this tournament about how, since some time we had lost the "killer spirit" ... we talked about how we both used to get really excited before going to an important tournament... but not anymore ..
The will of practicing non-stop had disapeared too, we now need alot of breaks ... alot of going out between the

games/practice.
The persons who practiced the most during WEG in my opinion were Moon and Sky... the others gamers come far behind i think.
I had some long thoughts about this and i decided that for this game i would be ready.
I put Sky on my mind, 24/7 i was thinking about how to beat him, how to play vs his style, why did i lose the previous times

etc.
No more going out, not even to eat, i'll get somebody to bring me food or i'll go out get something quickly only...
I practiced alot of games with Fire, Templer, HomeRunBall and Spell, using RotterdaM as host..
I lost many of those games, but my opponents gave me great advice, especially Fire & Spell.
Fire is very good at using Sky style so i saved all the replays and studied em later on.
I watched a whole bunch of replays of Sky vs Humans even tho i know the only one strat he always uses i wanted to check his

timings , creeproutes and such.
This one evening i playing a whole bunch right away and had a discussion with Grubby about how my and his practice went.
I was hoping i could get to practiced some vs Insomnia and Storm but they werent available.

The next day a friend of mine who works for CIG and GGL visited us in hangzhou, we went to a 150 years old restaurant nearby the west lake ... i decided to skip some practiced to get a great lunch and i didnt regret it ... the view was astonishing, from the first floor, i'll have to post some pictures later, it was beautiful, the food also was extremely good ... we had alot of dishes, one of my favorite was crispy rice with tomato sauce and shrimps, even the fish was really nice!!
It took few hours to each the restaurant, eat and go back... as i returned to my room i started looking for practice again...
This one night i finished practicing pretty late and lost many games .... i was not really confident at this time but RotterdaM gave me some nice words, he explained me that i was tired and some practiced games doesnt mean much...

during the night i couldnt sleep anymore for some reason .. it was pretty early i started to be nervous for my game already which normally wouldnt be such a good sign but it had been so long time that i hadnt been nervous for a game that it felt good ...

i tried to get some more rest ... but had hard time sleeping so i watched some more replays of Sky again ...
I finally was able to sleep some more .. and was pretty tired .. so i decided not to go to the arena with the WEG bus once again ... i ended up napping in JacziE's room on her 2nd bed with her naping on her bed ... some people from WEG staff came in and asked us to go take the bus ... we said we would go later by taxi, they seemed rather unhappy about this and insisted on us going now .. we didnt want to and said again we wanna stay ... they didnt agree and really wanted us to go now which is understandable ... i guess they were afraid we would arrive late which is likely ... at this time there could easily be alot
of traffic ...

We left to the area all together in the bus we joked around mostly with JacziE MIMI Grubby and Sky...
Then arrived at the arena .. many fans on our way to get in, would take so long time to sign or take picture for all those who want ...
We just went in the backstage right away ...
For this match, i knew the chinese fans would cheer really loudly for Sky and for Sky only, i prepared myself mentally not to be affected by this and to use it as a strenght... every "Sky JIA YOU !!" i would hear would just make me wanna beat him even more ...

Before playing i was bored of waiting so i read some predictions on sk-gaming, 95% of the people were predicting Sky as winner which i found kinda funny, i remember i even laughed outloud at one time while reading this ...
Some guy named FrankDrebin was like saying "Sky will rape ToD 3/0, I CANT BE WRONG ... I JUST CANT." i think its what cracked me up the most ... Not that im particulary cocky, i just find all those predictions to be sorta ridiculous most of times ...

this is what the forums have turned into ... prediction freaks fighting each other ... or the eternal Grubby fanboys against the Moon fanboys, i dont understand why those people just cant shut it and enjoy the show and the games played during these 2.

Anyway the first game started on Terenas Stand .. my favorite map !!
He took fast expansion and i got fast am lvl 3.. i pushed his expansion succesfully , didnt let him tower up and finished this one rather easily ....
Then came Echo Isle ... i knew Sky just loves mercs and was probably going to buy them .. so i decided to buy em too, and so did i ... he took expansion again , i tried to push it and killed really many units and didnt lose much .. i stole all the scrolls and the tome of retrain but still was losing in a big fight .. he had 3 arcannes and was massing t2... i knew that making 1 mortar with fragm upgrade would mean goodgame so i went for it ... i was in control of the game most of the time there was not much he could do .. in the end i got like 5 mortars and then it was really over .. maybe he coulda break in at
one time in my main but that would be his only chance ...
3rd map on TwistedMeadows ... this map is a fuckin joke if you ask me. If 2 players fastcreep the labo .. one gets xptome+vampaura and the other gets agilitytome+runedbraceer how is he supposed to win ? this map is like pure item luck only i hate it and i didnt practice a single game on it .. I was expecting to lose and was already thinking at what i was gona do on TR/TS next on which i had practiced ...

The game went pretty ok for me, i crept my labo and so did he ... i got the armor aura of the paladin and he got boots of elvenskin(agility), so thats better for me ... I wanted to militiacreep my merccamp but he creepjacked me so we fought and i killed a few of his units and got lvl 3 while he was 2.6 ... he pulled back a little , i finished creeping the merc camp and got a scroll of beast which is pretty good too... he reached tier2 before me and made 2arcannes + bloodmage for a change :D
i went for 1arcanne .. and started building 1guard tower additional to my arcanne one ...
I started to tech for tier3 and added a blacksmith to get a workshop later on ... the shop close to his base and i crept mine .. he found some bad item which he sold and got a xp tome .. i got a normal tome and armor aura again i believe which i sold
He bought a healscroll and headed to my base. He couldnt break in as i had 2 towers and tped next to em ... he went to my base by the left and i decided to take the fight .. i had 43 population he 50 ... i brought alot of militias and used scroll of beast .. fight went ok for me i didnt lose much but he neither .. i had to pull back in my base cuz low hp units .. i quickly bought a staff of sanct as i reached tier 3 and staffed a slowed unit which he was gonna kill..
He still was trying to push .. i started a paladin and fought some with him ... saved few units more with staff .. followed him mid map until i realised it was a bad idea and i better should wait for some mortars, so i pulled back, he went for bottom right spot the main base and crept it/took expansion there after finding an amulet of spell shield. He had already retrained his mage ... i bought a tp and went to creep some on top right where i found a ring+4 for my mk... he attacked my base again .. but as i was not far i decided to walk there to defend it ... i had 63 population and he too at this time, but i had like 4 mortars with fragm already, priests master and a knight.
As he saw me he started running away and trie to blizz/flame my mortars somehow, i dodged em all and at one time he had to tp ... he chosed to tp at bottom right at his expo to heal up there ... We had just fought near the top right shop so i was close to his expo and just got flare ... i used at both of bottom's expo and spotted his one ...
I attacked it right away .. he never could defend it .. i saved almost all my units with staff .. he had only priest/sorceresses and couldnt do anything vs my army .. he said gg and left!

And that's it i finally beat Sky and with the score of 3/0 !! i was extremely happy but as i got up to go and shake his hand i noticed he was pretty disapointed and crying ... i felt bad, at first it seemed like he didnt want to ... but then he got up and huged me and i remembered myself losing to him in WCG... i had rarely been this mad about losing a series ...
I used to think that it's badmanner to go shake the hand of your opponent if you just won.. because he might feel shitty and it's the loser's decision to want wether or not to go and shake the hand of the winner and congratulate him ...
Back in ESWC 2003 i remember losing to MaDFroG twice, in groupstage and Semi-final and going to shake his hand ... i accepted this lose rather easily ... same in 2004 .. i lost to him again but this time in quarter final .. even tho he had acted cocky
and i didnt like it i went to shake his hand cuz i knew i had played badly and he played good ...

But later on the tendancy changed .. i was geting more and more mad every time i lost ... I once lost in the final of a french lan when i was in Armateam .. to Blatty .. he was the one who always goes shake the hand of his opponents whenever he wins against somebody whos good .. after the game he came to me and i remember refusing to shake his hand as i was mad and i said he got lucky ...

I just needed a little time after losing to put things together in my head and accept it ... then later on i always goes to my opponent and shake his hand .. it was the same story vs Grubby in SEC 2005 when i lost in final i was extremely sad and mad ... but then after a few hours i shook his hand and told him gratz ...
Same against Zacard in Blizzcon.. when i first lost to him in WB i had hard time accepting the lose at first but after 2 min i shook his hand .. Then on the stage .. again.

After losing to Sky in WCG... so many cameras were pointed at me .. the whole audience had been cheering for him .. when he won the first game everybody applaused ... then when i won the 2nd game NOT A SINGLE PERSON did ... i remember i let this affect me alot... then when he won 3rd game i was already feeling shitty and everyone applaused him .. i felt even worse .. he came to shake my hand ... i was very close to refuse but i did shake his hand .....
When i won against him in WEG i thought if he did it hes not suposed to get mad if i do it too .. so i did.....

I had to do an interview right after this as always ... they asked me the usual questions including the funniest one :
"many people expected this match alot, saying that you and sky are the best human everyone wanted to know who the best human is"
My answer was something like " i think this is ridiculous, you cannot decide who the best player of a race is after seing him winning a mirror , and there are plenty of other good humans anyway.."

then i was asked who would i prefer to play in the grandfinal ..i ofcourse said Grubby cuz hes my mate ..!

As i was finished Grubby vs Moon was gonna start .. i had a last chat with Grubby and tried to give him some advice and boost his confidence .. i can tell i was more nervous during his games than during mine .... especially when he started winning the first one ... i remember my heart was beating really fast.. it was very exciting ..
and he did it .. after playing some amazing games he beat Moon 3/1 ... he pushed his chair away and jumped on the table raising his arms in the air ... the chinese audience knowing how huge this is stormed the stage and the first guy who reached Grubby hugged him which was kinda funny :)

Moon was all alone on his chair tho ...i felt kinda bad for him and hesitated to go and say something to him to cheer him up .. but i was afraid to make things worse .. i always am .. it was the same for Zacard already ..

As Grubby reached the backstage i felt pretty happy , congratulated him and we talked about the games and such...
I was already feeling very "satisfied" we both fight for the same team under the same colors ... seing both of us in final of such a tournament was just a great feeling. We started to make plans about going out right away to celebrate.

to be continued ..

E3 and LA ...

2006-05-13T02:39:55Z

Been a long time i didnt update my blog ... was mostly due to lazyness and also because when i update i dont like to leave out too many details or i feel like what i have done is "unfinished" thats why i believe that whenever i update my blog i have to write about the past previous days only.. otherwise i may leave out to many details that i forgot...
Anyway .. Im gonna have to skip the part about WEG and my flight back home as i think it would take to long to write now .. maybe i will do it later tho, this update mostly is about me going back home from China, E3 and the Vsportsallstar hosted by GGL...
As soon as i got home from WEG, i started to rest... slept alot.. tried not to eat too much of all the stuff thats bad for my health which i missed during my stay in China.

I didnt practice much or almost not at all during the first days... I knew i had an upcoming tournament and Eurocup matches online... I knew that for most of the players, after winning a major event its really hard not to drop alot of motivation and play worse, but i didnt think it would feel that bad... I used to REALLY miss playing whenever i wouldnt be playing for a few days... and think about this game alot more than i do now ...
Nowadays if i dont play for some time im just fine with it..

My health slowly started to get better as i got home ... i had been sick for a long time and finally some signs of healing appeared!
Shortly after this, my first Eurocup match took place, against Satiini on sunday 7th at 8pm ...
I didnt feel like playing this game ... i went into it with a losing spirit and got smashed rather badly .. i had practiced nothing before it, didnt even watch a single replay, it just saddened me to have to play like this.
After it, i reacted a little, i may be tired and bored of this game, its still my job and i wanna qualify and do good in any tournament i take part in .. i tried to motivate myself to prepare for my game against RotterdaM which was scheduled on Monday 8th at 9pm, for 2 days i played a bunch of ladders and actually searched for orcs to play custom games with twice! in the wc3l private channel on mirc. Rholle wanted to play, we played 2 games on ggclient and that was it.
Game time came again, and this time i played a little better... but was still bored overall. Particulary in the first game where he crept nothing, just came to me and then we kept running back and forth without fighting for a few minutes... that part really bored me the most and got me into whiny moob inside my head i kept thinking about how boring this can be sometimes...

Anyway i won 2/0 this time ... but wasnt particulary happy as i didnt really enjoy the games first game was some creeping then a big fight which i won ... second game was LS in my peons .. then many creeping of me and hitandrun from him, then a big fight which i won too...
After this my motivation remained to same ... i still tried to play few more ladders before leaving to USA... The next morning Tuesday 9th i had to go to the airport in Marseille where i took my first flight which was 1h long to Paris... arrived in Paris i didnt get to wait, i even had to hurry to catch my 2nd plane because the first one was late. I got into my 2nd flight which was heading straight to LAX... i got the middle-middle seat... there is 3 seats on each side and 3 in middle, well i was in one of the seat of the middle , and the middle one.. i dont like this seat much, because not much space, especially for tall people like me.

As i got to LA, it took pretty long to get through the customs, many people arrived at same time and very few people from homeland were working today at this airport apparently... i could hear everyone whining about this around me.. most of em talking in french.
I finally made it and waited for the shuttle that goes to my hotel which is the crowne plaza. The shuttle arrived after around 10min waiting and it took around 15min to reach the hotel... As i reached the hotel i checked in and went to my room and layed on my bed... date was still 9th and the time was like 3pm...

Grubby arrived shortly after. We went out to eat something, some quake players were here, Cooller and Sokrates, along with TosspoT from radio ITG.
We went to some macdonald like fastfood, which was pretty ok , i especially liked the chocolate shake.
Then we just went back to the hotel and fell asleep at around 6pm as we were VERY TIRED. The next morning we woke up at around 7am, showered, got dressed up, had breakfast in the hotels restaurant which was like around 15$ for the american buffet. Then we went to take the official E3 Shuttle which is free as long as you got the E3 shuttle bracelet!

As we arrived here we figured we couldnt get in, it was like 9h30 and apparently we could only start to get into the SOUTH HALL from 11 o clock... Luckily for us we saw 2 faces we know while walking around, Joe from GGL who was with Nai ( JoneysNai } They discussed about how to find a way to get us in... we had simple badges "exhibitis only" which is why we couldnt get in... but Nai had like a super VIP pass or something + an extra one , so i took my card outa my badge, put it in the extra one she had and walked in while Grubby was waiting outside. As i got in i gave it back to her, she went outside to help out Grubby getting in.

I went to the NVIDIA booth and was surprised to see that the GGL booth which was part of the nVIDIA one was located in the corner of the hall ... like where not many people goes, almost hidden!
Anyway i said hi to everyone i know, tried the pcs, and knew right away that this wasnt going to work. The screens they were using were like 13inches or something, but the size from left to right was particulary long... those screens were ridiculously large... This kind of screen isnt done for gaming in my opinion, its more like to watch movies in 16/9....

I know GGL events are usually done to look good to the publics eyes but this was just too much, the chairs, the screen, the shoutcast outloud while we would play.. i knew this was just not going to work... As i had to play against Grubby we started talking about playing fungames instead and decided to chose to play very different heroes. We had long talk and bargain about it.. to agree on something "balanced" ...
In the end we agreed to play BM/SH on maelstrom and DR/DR on TR ;D

We played the games without pressure.. we played quite terrible and made alot of mistakes in my opinion... i remember on Maelstrom having a long fight at the fountain, then sending my bloodmage away from the fight cuz he was running low hp... then i checked up on him he was fighting with the creeps from the camp at in the middle... i have no idea how that could happen and why he went this far... probably just the fucked up sensitivity and mousedelay with those screens... i could feel Grubby couldnt play his best too anyway ... i lost that game quite hardly.
On Turtle Rock, as my peon reached the tavern i could hear the caster mention that Grubby had already hired his own Darkranger and started creeping with it... i could hear everything, him creeping the big camp at top right too which made me "guess" that he would also expand over here right away....!
i got lucky and found 2 scroll of beast.... attacked and won, to sum it up very short.

After those games i can say i had no particular feeling, i hadnt had any fun at all i can say. I was worried about my next games... if Lucifer and Moon didnt wanna play fun games i personally wouldnt want to play seriously cuz i knew it wasnt going to be possible... So i went to talk to Jason from GGL, i complained and complained and complained more. I made suggestions, resizing the screens to a normal size. Turning off the cast and Turning off the screens that shows the same as on our screens which were right in front of the players... Apparently none of this was possible.. I kept on complaining and we found some solutions along with Orlandu. Playing the cast on Waaaghtv with a delay first of all, which would fix everything except for the screens maybe.

There didnt seem to be any solution for the screens. Later on there was some party organised at the figuera hotel just like last year, we also had some interview scheduled over here. so we walked here and waited for loooongggg time ! the koreans fell asleep in the lobby then we finally started with the interviews... as soon as me and Grubby finished (it took a while) we wanted to leave by taxi right away to go back to the hotel and rest, we said bye to everyone, went outside and O surprise there was a hugeeeeee line of people waiting for cabs in front of every hotel !
After looking for a cab for 30min we gave up and decided to try again later. We went back to the party.. the CS game was going on and America was rolling over Europe apparently. It ended pretty quickly and i got to use one of the computers to chat some and watch some replays, while the others wc3 players were watching a double of my screen.
As i saw that the counterstrike players used normal screens instead of very large one like us i suggested to GGL that we could use the same for WC3, they said theill see what they can do.
I was pretty happy aswell with Lucifer with whom i had been whining about the screens for a long time with, now.

We went back to the hotel together in some Taxi van, me Lucifer Moon Grubby Youngstone. As we arrived to the hotel i went to Youngstones room to use his internet to talk with some friends ( you know who you are !)
Then went back to my room to sleep at around 11
But i got a phonecall, saying that tomorrow we can use the same screens as the cs players! it made me happy but not too much as i still didnt really feel like playing.

The next morning i woke up at 8:30am, and wondered "what time am i playing at" then Grubby found the schedule and told me im suposed to play at 9.... the event being around 45min to 1h away from here it would be kinda hard to reach it in time.. i hurried to shower and get dressed, jumped in the first shuttle that arrived and went to the event without eating... as i arrived, Lucifer was already here along with Moon, i realised i forgot my mousepad .. and got quite mad because of this.. i knew its not possible to find a similar mousepad at the event and i knew that i only forgot it because i hurried.. but anyway it was my fault. I setup as fast as i could and noticed that some lights were aiming right on my screen which was kinda anoying when i was playing.. it was blinding me.. they said they couldnt fix it so i had to play like this.. whatever.
I had to use one of the Nvidia mousepads that was previously used for the booth... it was pretty terrible but i didnt have the choice...
We started the first game on TR and i got kinda raped.. his high level heroes nuked me the whole game and i had to type gg.
Then during second game, i think this is one of the biggest jokes since i started WC3.. some guy was having a phonecall RIGHT NEXT TO ME , like not even 1 meter away. I could hear his whole conversation like " hey whatsup dood im at E3 hows it going". Its kinda hard to focus in tournament games usually but if someone like this is having a phonecall next to me there is no way i can think about what im doing properly... i kept geting more and more angry inside me but didnt say anything outloud like "Move THE FUCK OUT" or things would probably have gotten worse, So after a so so start i headed to Lucifers base to kill something and sniped a Ziggurat and then somebody moved the central unity on my left ( which was mine } and my keyboard stopped working, i kept trying to letters or to type something but it was like blinking like a bug... i figured i was in the Undeads base and i have to do something RIGHT NOW to fix this.. i tried to pause but couldnt... then i got tabbed out all of sudden.... I cliked on the wc3 icon asap and cliked on menu then on pause but it was kinda late , my archmage just died and all my foots were in the middle of his base meaning i would lose at least half of them... the game was paused i still couldnt write... i spammed my keyboard and it wroted something like "afasds" ... i took few seconds to think what to do, then got a little mad at the situation and decided to just call it gg and leave.

Lucifer was wondering why i left and asked me ..i said i was prolly dead, and explained what happened. At this point i was thinking about not even showing up for my game vs Moon considering the conditions ive had to play for the last game, i was quite mad, i dont think anybody would like to lose like this, but i tried to take it easy thinking that even if i played in conditions i would lose to Lucifer.
Anyway Grubby had to play Moon , they played and it went 1/1, the games were pretty ok to watch.. bunny was exceptionally casting em so it was nice ;D
Then i had to play Moon and i expected to prolly get raped.. but i got a different spot, there was no bad light on my screen and i used Grubbys mousepad which was quite good actually.. i had a good start in both games then made some good surrounds which were pretty much the only fun part in those games.. the rest was just the same and old combo of units vs the same combo ... I won and felt a little satisfied but not particulary. Then we had to rush to get some food because Grubby/bunny were waiting for me and Grubby had some personal stuff to take care of 1h after so we didnt have much time. We went to a food court which was sort of close. Grubby left earlier than us. I finished eating with Theo and bunny, then we went back to the event. bunny told us we re invited to a Blizzard party in holywood, we were kind of tired so we decided to go back to the hotel to rest some and change before going to the party. But then we heard there is the HHGL event starting soon in another hall... I personally listen to alot of hiphop so, seeing 50cent and DRE in real life sounded cool and i thought i could take some pictures. We went at where the event was suposed to be going on and waited a whole lot of time.. it was suposed to start at 4 but at 4:20 none was here yet.. there was a funny speaker trying to warm the audience by talking non-stop gangsta style ;P
Grubby told me something like "somebody just told me that with this kind of star its usually very comon to arrive late 1h to the events"
As i was tired and my back hurted i said ok lets go... As we were heading toward the exit.... on the escalator going up i took a look at the other one escalator going down and there was like the whole gang of black doods, i looked at them and WHO WAS IT. IT WAS 50CENT RIGHT THERE ! i went back down the stairs right away and got back the booth were he was heading, took a few pictures then went back to the hotel with a feeling of "satisfation"

As we arrived in Holywood we couldnt find bunny so we had to call her and told her to meet in front of the famous chinese theater on holywood boulevard. She came to us and took us to the party, there were many blizzard employees and their guests. We got introduced to a few people and got to know a few other, most of them were pretty nice i would , actually all of them seemed to be nice, we had chats not only about gaming but pretty much everything, then we had to leave rather earlier, being far from out hotel and Grubby having game tomorrow... so as we left bunny gave Grubby his birthday present ( a Grom Hellscream statue from blizzard ) and we got back to the hotel.
Bought some donuts and drinks downstairs and went to sleep.

This morning we got up rather early and headed to the event.. there was alot of traffic trouble today so we arrived late... but to our surprise the Koreans werent here either... and arrived long later!!! Grubby got alot of time to warmup then played and convincingly won 2/0, i knew the top 2 was again 2 4K so i was pretty happy.. i didnt wanna play rematches even tho i know i coulda get 1st. We got our prizes, then went to the WEST hall to take a look there ( its the best hall of E3 according to many ) i went to the psp booth and stayed here for a while ... so many people came here with their own psp to try out stuff it was funny. We took a picture with a very big boobed nurse who apparently enjoyed posing in a dirty way for pictures ;D. We headed back to the hotel and right now nearly everyone went out to get some food, but i wasnt hungry and im pretty tired so im staying in my room, after browsing some websites i thought it could be a good opportunity to update my blog so i did. Im having long thoughts on wether or not the conditions affected me alot in this event or , how bad were they for the other players and how much did it affect them. Im personally very proud of GGL who really listened to me and tried their best to make things better after i complained!

anyway maybe more content to come later ! im flying home on 15th, hope you enjoyed the read!

;D

2006-04-29T10:20:28Z

I posted my last blog yesterday at 4pm, shortly after posting it, i went to shower, got ready to leave for the WEG arena, Grubby came along with me, we went there by taxi as usual... i picked up the address of the stadium quickly in the WEG office just before leaving.
This morning i had to use the restroom 3 times before leaving so i was pretty worried about the trip to the stadium, but it went pretty ok as i didnt feel the need to go while in the cab.
I used this trip to discuss strategies with Grubby, as i got very little practice for this game i didnt know what strats i was gona use, so i asked him for advice, but he couldnt help me much because hes rooming with Moon and saw all his practice...
As i arrived at the stadium Sweet/Sky were already setup, as always i got to play last, don't know why i got to play last 3 times, i think it kinda sucks.
The game started on EchoIsle, Sky had told me earlier that he has a "new style" on this map, i was looking forward to see what its like, but as the game started i had to go to the restroom so i missed the beginning, when i came back, Sky was puting up and expansion and had a few mercenaries, it didnt look like the harass of Sweet had been any good.
As soon as the expand got up, Sky just prevented Sweet from geting an expansion himself and obviously won with a combo of Knights/FlyingMachines, who said deja vu ? :D
The 2nd game on TurtleRock, i dont know why Sky played so differently, he tried to expand tier2 and mass towers, didnt even make 2 aviaries at same time... he had just mass towers to defend against those destroyers, he lost that one pretty hard.
The 3rd game on TerenasStand, Sky again expand tier2, Sweet's DK harass was pretty poor, could barely find Sky ever and didnt jack him when he was creeping his expansion, Sky logically won that one kinda like the first one.
The chinese audience cheered really loudly for Sky during these games.
As they just finished, i went on the stage to setup my stuff and got welcomed by the audience quite warmly, i started to plug my keyboard/mouse. Moon walked in and the pbulic here made even more noise.
The game was about to start, and i already have had to use the restroom 3 times in this stadium...
It's quite sad in china, nearly everywhere in the restroom if you have to go there, there is like this hole in the ground ... I hate it , it smells like death in the toilets and theres no paper too, always.
But anyway there was some sound problem or something and the game was delayed by 30min...
30min during which i was pretty stressed about wether or not i was gona have to leave my computer to go the toilets during my games... the more they made us wait the more the chances for that to happen were growing...
Finally after some time they seemed to have fixed it, and we could start.
Our music started, we went on the stage, shaked hands, and got ready to play.
I started to feel better as the games started, i was almost "ok"
The first game on TurtleRock, was close positions, i went for am2footmen, he DHarcher,
I surrounded his Demon in the beginning as i always do when i play vs Moon, but i knew it's not giving me really an edge because Elf doesnt care much about losing a TownPortal in beginning of the game, it happens all the time and they still win most of those games.
Later on we both added a naga, i crept more , like am 2andhalf, he was 1andhalf. I added 2 arcannes, he went for 2 lores and full dryads to counter my casters, so i switched to rifle which you would think is the logical counter to dryads!
I tried to push in fear that if i let him creep he will be able to get too much and add bears and rape me.
His moonwells kinda saved the day at every of my attack, healing his heroes/units like if they had infinite water, i think he used like 2~3 moonstone during this game also.
I lost my naga a couple of times even tho i had potion on her always, its quite hard to run away from DH/boots,dryads/poison, naga/frozenarrow, and had to type gg.
The 2nd game on TerenasStand, as i mentioned earlier i lost 90% of my practice games on it, its a very special feeling to know what your opponent is gona do but also know that you cant counter it. I tried to stop him, sent a peon at both camp, my peon was even ahead of his wisp at the left camp but his wisp catched up and he got them before me!!
As he got the 4 mercs it was obvious i had no chance anymore so i just left, went to shake his hand cuz he played his game and did it well.
One of the rare time i didnt give a damn at all about losing a series in a tournament.
After this i went back to the hotel with Grubby/Zinna/Craven( from readmore.de )
We had a very funny chat with Craven where me and Grubby kept repeating his nickname ;p
I had to wait for JacziE at the hotel to go to a Korean restaurant, and it took her pretty damn long ! i hadnt eaten in 24hours cuz my stomach was too messy but now i really felt like i had to eat soon.
We went there as soon as she came here, we asked everybody else who wanna goes as always and some chinese reporters+Moon said they would come later.
We went to the restaurant and the whole WEG staff was here already.
It had been so long time i didnt eat sab gyup sal it was so good ! we ordered more ~
Then we went back to the hotel and chilled some .... JacziE took a nap on Zacard's bed, Zacard practiced many orc/orc then went to play poker with the other Koreans, as i was chatting some and played few ladder games.
Later in the Night Moon msged me and asked me if im not sleeping. I was not , i asked him if he wants game he said ok.
We played few games for money me Elf he Orc then i went to sleep.
Today i woke up at 3, got awaken by the sound of a keyboard being hit!
Zacard was practicing and 350apm on his poor keyboard makes alot of noise~
They left at around 4:30, i watched of bunch of reps and chatted with many people until now, it's 6:15 i'm going to pack my stuff and go to the arena in case there is rematches.
My hopes are not high for this, i dont care much to be honest i dont expect anything.
Tomorrow we withdrew the matches/maps in case theres a 3 way tie in both group.
In group A if theres rematches the first game will be Zacard/Sweet on EI then the winner of it vs Grubby on EI and the loser of it vs Grubby on TR.
Yesterday when i saw xiaOt i told him "you gonna win 2/1 ??!" then he said "ok ok ok" and as soon as i turned around he said "2/0!!"
Then during the meeting where we withdrew the maps he was saying " ~2~ ~ 0 ~" with his mouth but without making any noise, he cracked me up :D
We withdrew the first name which was xiaOt, and he was extra cocky like "Yeahh!"
Then the 2nd name was me so i went like " YES!!!"
Then we had to decide the first map, EI was picked and both me and xiaOt went like "WOOHOO YEAH"
Then the loser of me/xiaOt would play GoStop on TR and the winner too i believe, we were both like "YEAH" again and GoStop looked at me weirdly and was thinking "wtf?":D
Anyway its now 6:21 i have to leave to the arena~ bye

-__-

2006-04-28T07:58:40Z

During the night FoV had to leave to go back to Korea.
On the 27th i woke up at around 11am and was still feeling quite sick, i went back to sleep and slept until 6pm, i got up and finally started to feel better, went to shower and wanted to get some food. I asked to everyone who's hungry, nobody was except Moon.
I went to eat with Moon to the restaurant with western food, but had to stop at the ATM close to here to get some cash, later on in the restaurant we had a little chat about the matchup HU vs ELF.
As i got back to the hotel i went to check on the koreans in Sweet's room, GoStop/Zacard/Sweet were playing poker here. They asked me if i wanna play ,i declined. Sweet asked me for practice to prepare for Sky. I went back to my room shortly after.
Couple of minutes later Sweet came here to ask for practice again, so we played a bunch of games which was quite fun.
At 10pm nearly all the players wanted to go eat... so i thought i'll go even if i prolly wont get much food as i ate not long ago.
I went there with GoStop/Sweet/Moon/Grubby/JacziE/Zinna.
The waitress we like the most in this restaurant was here tonight, we are lucky.
As we were taking some time to chose what we would order, xiaOt and Sky came in which is quite surprising, usually xiaOt always comes to eat with us but Sky nearly never, so i was happy.
The whole dinner was quite nice, everyone joking around, xiaOt is extremely funny.
As i got back to the hotel i tried to get some practice vs Elf, I asked many people, many of them declined or didnt reply for a change -,-
Grubby mentioned earlier that he practiced with RotterdaM and Ciara, i asked "on which host???????"
he said he gets around 100ping with one of them as host...
So i thought maybe i could try, i played a game against DIDI8 on RdaM's host, the lag was worse than 100ping but prolly playable... i knew i could get to play vs asians with much less ping so i played only 1 game and tried to find Koreans to play with.
Check accepted to help me even tho he has 2 games today (FoCuS/ReMinD)
We played only on TS and i lost nearly all games... I dont know what to do on this map it seems like it's hopeless :(
After these games i didnt really feel like practicing more so i just went to lay on my bed for a while.
Then got up again and played like 3 dota in a row with many of the cs players. then at around 5am i went to sleep.
Today i woke up at around 3pm, headache is completely gone but my stomach is still messy. The bus leaves the hotel at 4pm and its now 3:59 i havent showered yet. I know im not gona go in this bus, my game might start at like 7pm so i have time .. i'll just go there by taxi whenever i feel better, if i do....

T_T

2006-04-27T06:30:25Z

My last entry ended on 25th at 5:11am, i played a few practice games then went to sleep.
The practice games didnt go too well, i think TerenasStand is extremely hard... TurtleRock is 50/50 and TM ... no comment, not even practicing on it.
I woke up in the afternoon and looked for practice the whole day without finding any, while nearly all the players were playing poker in my room.
I first just msged all the NightElfs i saw arround, then after trying to play vs some Europeans one i gave up since it was too laggy, so i tried to find some Chinese/Koreans , but couldnt find any they are all either afk/busy/dont wanna play~ Only ReMinD helped me out a little. This one day i had a small headache for nearly the whole day, that never left me.
At night it was KEN's birthday ( one of the WEG referees ) we all went down to the chinese restaurant next to the hotel and had some food together~
I went to sleep shortly after that.
on 26th, FoV come to my room to use my PC to practice against Grubby, and woke me up, i watched his practice games to give some advice to Grubby while Zacard was playing Sweet next to FoV, i tried not to look at his as much as possible.
Then pretty much everyone left for the stadium at 3 except me/Zacard/FoV as i was waiting for Zinna a friend of ours who hadnt arrived yet.
She arrived shortly after the others left, we got prepared and went to the stadium by taxi.
When we arrived at the stadium, Grubby/Sweet were already setup and almost ready to play, at first we could barely watch the games because in the backstage the only person obsing the game is a referee which we cant sit next to, so we had to watch from kinda far, his pretty small screen.
But today WEG finally setup a huge TV so the players could follow the games.
Grubby won the first game where he played flawlessy imo, then before the 2nd game started there was only 3 referees in the game and Sweet, Grubby hadnt joined yet, and i saw a referee saying "Sweet jia you!!"
Which means like Sweet Fighting !
I was quite shocked as it is one of the most unprofessionnal things a referee can do, i have taken part in many tournaments and NEVER have i seen this kind of thing happening in WCG/ESWC.
Anyway.... Sweet won the 2nd game on TerenasStand, and Grubby won the decider map on TM, after his game, me/FoV/Zinna were waiting for him to go eat, he had to do a few interviews then we left to chinese restaurant, some fan followed us quite far just hoping to get an autograph from Grubby who saw how hard this guy was trying and decided to go up to him and to give him a signature.
I asked one of the translater to order a few stuff i already tried, plus something else if he thinks thats good. The ones i already knew which i like are some kinda beef, sweet sour pork and fried rice. And surprisingly i tried 2 new very good stuff this day. Some kind of fried potatoes and a mushroom salad.
In china... for some reason they always bring the rice so late, we were finished with all our dishes and geting ready to leave and they brought us the rice just now when we had been waiting 30min for it...
We didnt wanna pay for it as it is unacceptable .. but in the end we didnt wanna make any trouble so we paid for it even tho we didnt eat it.
At the end of the dinner we heard that xiaOt had finished his games and lost 0/2, and that he was coming to us to the restaurant ~
He arrived there and we tried to talk about his games vs Moon but he didnt really want to... all he said was "map is bitch"
We left shortly after that, met JacziE in front the stadium and left to the hotel with 2 cabs.
I wasnt feeling good at all this day but it got worse as soon as i reached the hotel. I was freezing in the evening, i went to bed early with all my clothes on and was still freezing under the blanket... i asked the other people in the room to have the air conditioner remain turned off.
I had a very heavy headache and stomach pain too..... i'm lucky tho i had JacziE look after me, geting me water and making me some tea.i woke up 3 times in few hours sleep and every time had hard time falling asleep again. At arround 5 i finally fell asleep for good.
This morning i woke up at 11 and still had the same headache, as the stomach pain was almost gone ... but as i got up both came back to make me feel just like yesterday. I had to use the restroom i couple of times already.
I know that if i feel like this tomorrow, i wont even be able to go to the stadium as i cant afford a 40~50min trip to go there due to my stomach i could have to use a restroom anytime.
its now 2:30pm and it doesnt look like im geting any better, i took alot of medicine yesterday it doesnt seem to be doing anything to me.
During this whole time i also couldnt practice anything, i didnt even try.. as it would be senseless to play like this.
I hope i can recover today, wake up tomorrow and go to the stadium, play my game and have fun ~