ESL One Frankfurt 2016

After a couple of days at home it was time for us to go to our next event, ESL One Frankfurt! We’ve been here competing twice before and I’m looking forward to our third time! I like how they have changed the structure of the event that there is a GSL group stage in the beginning that actually matters in the playoffs (only top 2 from the group stage advance to the playoffs). I think they had a playoff straight away that was single elimination at their first event here so you could get eliminated after just playing one bo3 but now everyone gets to play at least 2 series which is a bit better for the teams that travel far to get here. We are lucky though that there is a direct flight from Gothenburg to Frankfurt so it’s quite easy for us to get here! 🙂

The tournament starts on Friday so tomorrow will be media day which means that we (as usual) will take some pictures and someone will probably do an interview as well. We have gotten quite used to how every tournament wants to take the pictures so it usually goes quite fast.

Just got back to my room after dinner with the team and gym with s4. The dinner took ages because the hotel is quite new (the reception isn’t even finished) so the crew that worked at the restaurant wasn’t the fastest one so to speak. It was okay though because the staff were very polite and apologized for the delay and apart from that the hotel is good (Loda just said he only got cold water when he took a shower though so I will have to check that out.. ^^). The hotels at the latest events has been super good so I feel a bit spoiled. Sometimes I think back when we went to compete at Dreamhack in 2006 and we slept on the concrete floor at the event and when we won we got 800 dollars to split with the team. It was barely enough to cover for the expenses for the trip but I was still super happy but I guess that comes with being 18 years old and not having any responsibilities when it comes to earn enough money to make a living. If I would be able to go back and ask myself how I thought eSports would look like in 10 years from then I would never guess that there would be prize pools as big as there is today and that events would be played in arenas.

Time to watch some anime before I go to sleep. I started to watch “Guilty Crown” lately which is decent, not a master piece but enough interesting to want me to keep on watching. I don’t watch so much anime but there are some I really like, my all time favorite is by far Steins;Gate but I also really liked Code Geass, Death Note and newer ones like Attack on Titans etc. I like when there isn’t more than like 20-30 episodes or it’s often quite slow paced.

Good night! 🙂

Akke