CS_Summit is not your conventional tournament, something which prior to beginning could really have went horribly, or, as we have experienced, really well.

Summit is designed similar to TakeTV’s Homestory Cup, The Summit tournament series is designed as a “behind-the-scenes” style event as opposed to the usual arena style shows that almost all top tier Counterstrike tournaments have.

We’ve seen a laid back side of competitive CS that hasn’t always been available to fans watching the streams of the competitions. Beyond The Summit state that this is done “to give players a platform to connect more directly with fans and to share the personalities, insight, & humour behind the names.”

This is one of the main reasons Summit has worked as well as it has, from the instances of pro-players casting, for example Friberg and Steel commenting during SK v Cloud9., similarly we saw Fallen cast in the same way. We were able to get some very useful insight from pros playing at the same level as the competition along with getting to know them better than just their plays.

The setting is another main contributor to the success of CS_Summit. Rather than your large, open and at times atmosphere desolate arenas, we had the unusual setting of a private house in the Greater Los Angeles area. This evoked memories of old school LAN parties for many viewers, myself included. This is a clever way of throwing back to the old school days of eSports and paying homage to the charismatic LANs of days gone by.

The laid back atmosphere of the tournament was epitomised by the ‘team posters’ created by the Beyond The Summit team which were absolutely hilarious.

The positioning of the camera meant that after players exited their ‘game room’ they then would walk past the casters on their duo couch. This allowed for players to give a little insight post game and for a bit of a joke afterwards (see ‘Bad Fallen’).

The personal connection comes from that the fact that Beyond The Summit themselves are invested in eSports and have a passion for these games and the competitive scenes. David ‘LD’ Gorman leads BTS passionately from the front, so much so that the house used for the tournament is his own and not some rented property solely for the event

On a whole I feel the community got to know casters and players a lot better due to this tournament, it was nice seeing the casters that have led us through massive arena finals out of their suits and in a nice relaxed environment. This let us get to know them more and it worked like a treat, instead of the constant play by play analysis we got a charismatic and entertaining casting session. That’s not to say that play by play is bad in all aspects but your average viewer could still enjoy the game without the analysis of someone opening a door or coming off of spawn. This is the point that, within Summit, the casters would talk about other things, involve others on the desk(?) and in turn get the audience more engaged with the stream.

CS_Summit has been a brilliant break from the overly analytical casting that majors and other tournaments seem to suffer from. It has brought the community together in a way through being able to see the interactions of players post game rather than a straight cut to the commentary desk.

That’s not to say that every event should be like this, the rarity of this makes it one of the reasons it is so special. Arena tournaments create special moments, especially when the crowd are engaged but I feel that if we had a tournament like CS_Summit once every two to three months then it could be a very successful thing.

More than anything however is the team atmosphere between the entire pro scene. It is all one big family and some of the behind the scenes shots of Beyond The Summit show that. It’s a softer side of competitive Counterstrike but its one that the community and casual fans like to see. The highlight of this for me has been the celebration of Sixer of EnVyUs’ birthday, it was nice to see people rally around him and celebrate with him despite the highly competitive environment everyone was in, something which is testament to the brilliant tournament Beyond The Summit hosted for us.

Hopefully Beyond The Summit regard this tournament as much of a success as the fans, pros and casters alike have and can plan something like this again for the not so distant future.