The French qualifier and reigning Clanbase Eurocup champions H2k.Thermaltake (H2k) beat the Dutch KomaCrew in a best-of-one final on mp_Backlot, 13 – 7. British qualifiers Meet Your Makers (MYM) beat the surprise of the tournament Team Belgium in the third place play-off, 13 – 7.

KomaCrew and H2k were both drawn in group B alongside the qualifiers from Switzerland and Italy, Tetris and Team Italy respectively. The first, third, fifth and seventh seeds: Team SPEED-LINK (Germany), MYM, wNs (Spain) and Team Italy were drawn in group A.

The Dutch team had to cope with a last minute line-up change as Roman 'roman' Semjonov was removed from the lineup after internal problems. The players gave an informal explanation and cited that his unrelenting whine had become too difficult to deal with. The team asked if they could use a stand-in for the tournament and Games Services, the Electronic Sports World Cup organisers agreed. Sample This star Kaj 'Kajsk1ng' Van Staalduinen was the chosen fifth.

The team had only recently changed their lineup after Youri 'Kasparov' Mohrs became inactive due to real life issues and was replaced by Nick 'toxjee' Hol for the Acer Challenge LAN event last month in Enschede, Holland. The team beat H2k in the Acer final in a three map thriller which went into double overtime on the third map.

H2k beat KomaCrew in the group stages 13 – 8 on mp_District and finished first in a group where neither team was challenged for their play-off spot. H2k beat both Team Italy and Tetris by a huge score of 13 – 2. KomaCrew fared just as well beating them by similarly large scores: 13 – 6 (vs. Tetris) and 13 – 1 (vs. Team Italy).

Group A was the more competitive of the two with MYM, Team SPEED-LINK (SL) and Team Belgium all realistically vying for a play-off spot with the Spanish side wNs as the fourth qualifier. Things quickly turned against top seeds SL as they struggled to find the same form which saw them finish second behind H2k in the Eurocup and beat SK Gaming in the German qualifier, both online.

The Germans lost against both MYM (7 – 13) and Team Belgium (3 – 13) meaning a 13 – 4 win against wNs was irrelevant. The defeat to Team Belgium was particularly embarrassing as the team failed to pick up any rounds in their attack phase on mp_Crash, and as they switched sides at half team trailed 0 – 12 to the all-star Belgian mix of TEK-9 Networks (TEK-9) and LowLandLions (L3) players of Thomas 'Restyle' Billen, Benny 'yazzy' Verheyen, Davy 'Davy' Sysmans, Stevy 'Stevy' Verheyen and Jan 'Sticky' Craeynest.



The Germans poor performance over the weekend renewed suspicion around the players online performance, though Team Belgium also went onto beat MYM 13 – 6, it's unlikely to ease unless the team performance offline raises considerably.

H2k as the first place finishers of group B faced off against group A runners-up MYM and vice versa with Team Belgium playing against KomaCrew in the semi-finals. All matches in the tournament were played under a best-of-one format with a third place decider for the losers of both semi-finals. H2k won five Packed Bell PC's for finishing first, KomaCrew each won a 22” LCD monitor and MYM picked up some smaller hardware.



Special thanks go to TEK-9 Networks player Antonin 'OZWALD' Grenier and H2k, you can view more of Antonin's (higher quality) videos here.