Chronicles of the G2 Ares Academy. Chapter 1 — “The First LAN Tournament”

We’re joined by Vyacheslav “innersh1ne” Britvin! In the first part, I mainly talked about how and why I came to work at G2 Ares; now it’s time to discuss the start of the work process and my first few months on the job.

In addition to signing in-game leader Kasper “SHiNE” Wennerberg, I had French player Shun “Nidoria” Nguyen Van on the bench—the younger brother of former Team Vitality player Jason “Kyojin” Nguyen Van. A highly promising player with strong mechanics, Nidoria looked like a potential asset—especially since he was only 18 years old. However, I needed to understand how ready each player was for the long haul.

After speaking with everyone, I had doubts about Shun’s motivation and his confidence in his future career—at least at that point. So, we started the season with the following roster:

In my head, it was all pretty simple—the online portion, consisting of a lot of theory in the first few weeks, followed by qualifiers, online tournaments, and practice matches. After a few months of working from home, we planned a trip to a LAN tournament and boot camp.

Things didn’t quite go according to plan—I’d forgotten that the Tier 3 scene has a very different schedule from Tier 1. At the “top tier,” everything is stable and you can plan your schedule well in advance, whereas at lower levels of play, it’s a constant stream of qualifiers, ESEA Advanced in the evenings, and a stable schedule only a couple of days ahead. This affected our workflow a bit during the first few months and made things a little chaotic. On top of that, IstanbuLAN—a $25,000 event in Istanbul—came out of nowhere.

I wanted to assess the “starting point” of the team and the players individually. In the end, we decided that the chance to play in the 64-team qualifiers for IstanbuLAN was exactly what we needed. Only 16 teams were supposed to advance to the final LAN stage of the tournament, so in my view, if we made it to the LAN event, it meant we’d earned it. The entry fee was $500.

However, the organizers were unable to recruit enough participants for the qualifiers, so we received a slot for the tournament in Istanbul, and suddenly the situation changed—instead of starting our regular workflow, we began preparing for IstanbuLAN.

On travel day, we flew to Turkey, checked into the hotel—everything was fine—but the problems began on the first day of the tournament. The technical staff had no experience organizing large international events; their only experience was with local Turkish LAN events.

Even though the IstanbuLAN organizers had a general idea of how everything should be set up and tried very hard, the first day was chaotic. On top of that, it’s worth noting that the tournament format was single-elimination, and our match was scheduled right at the very beginning of the day.

As a result, we woke up early the day after our flights to be ready for our 10:00 a.m. match, but the match was delayed by nearly three hours, and they were unable to fully resolve the technical issues. We played against Bushido Wildcats, a Turkish team, and lost the best-of-3 series without even taking a map.

There was some nerves, there were mistakes—it’s bound to happen. Despite the external circumstances, that’s no excuse—we deserved to lose the match—and since our return flights were booked for three days later, we decided not to waste time and play in the qualifiers instead. Since there were no boot camps available, my guys got to experience what it’s really like to play from a computer club. We spent one of the days walking around Istanbul.

Yes, it wasn’t the most comfortable, but it was exciting, and the trip turned out to be memorable. Was it a success? Probably not. I’d say that overall, the trip to Istanbul was useful for everyone to get to know each other and for team building, but on the whole, it was a mixed bag. Nevertheless, I don’t regret how things turned out.

After that, we returned home and got down to the online grind.

In addition to our training days, we really wanted to consistently identify and correct our mistakes in real matches. We started the year ranked 288th in the VRS rankings, which was barely enough to qualify for any tournaments. We played through qualifiers here and there, but eventually, in mid-February, we received an invitation to a partially ranked event, the Exort Meteor Series 2. Our results there were as follows:

This was our first serious run in terms of results and our first victories over some solid opponents. By the end of the tournament, we had climbed more than 100 spots in the VRS standings and began preparing for the next LAN event.