AIS Counter Strike Tournament
Date
April 10, 2010Venue
USC Game Pipe Lab, Ronald Tutor Hall 321Taking responsibilities seems to be my immediate response to whatever is going on, around me. It was no different when we at Association of Indian Students - USC, were deciding on the incharge for Counter Strike Tournament to be held on April 10, 2010 at the USC Game Pipe Lab. Anand Raman (Senior VP Membership, AIS) was supposed to be the event head and I was supposed to assist him, as and when required. Unfortunately things didn’t turn out in his favor (or may be in my favor :P), and I was made the lead incharge of the event.
Everything was smooth and perfect until a day before the tournament (mostly because we didn't have much to do before that), when the panic began. We had to inform the participating teams (16 in all) about the rules and structure of the competition, at least 24 hours in advance and install the games on the Computer systems, at least 12 hours before the competition. Somehow, we managed to achieve the first milestone before the second one was due, triggered by a call from Shiven Gandhi (VP Programming, AIS). Thanks to Dheeraj Mehta who finally allowed me to send the event confirmation email without a copy of the server.cfg file. For those of you who have no idea about Dheeraj or server.cfg, let me just say that Dheeraj was as important for organizing this competition as is server.cfg file for playing the Counter Strike 1.6 in Multiplayer mode :P
To give due credit to the guy, Dheeraj Mehta got us the permission to use the USC Game Pipe Lab, RTH 321. My knowledge about the lab was so vast that initially I thought it was SAL 103. It would have been real fun, had I installed the game at SAL 103, in place of RTH 321. Thankfully, I didn't.
After sending out the emails, we (I and Dheeraj) started installing the game. We had a number of setups of the Game. First in line was the Original Disc given by Warren, which apparently we were never going to use. It supposedly was like those wine bottles in our homes that we keep, only to show to the visitors [Uncle Sam this is a bottle of wine from 1848, the year My Great Great Great Grandfather was born, to be opened in the year my Great Great Great Grandchild will be born] Next in line, was a link given by Anand. It had only one flaw, the tournament was supposed to be of Counter Strike 1.6 and the link was of Counter Strike Condition Zero. For those of you, who have no idea about Counter Strike and haven’t stopped reading yet, let me just say that replacing 1.6 by Condition Zero for the tournament would have been like replacing Shahrukh Khan by Ambrish Puri for the lead role of a Bollywood Movie. Dheeraj was also carrying a setup which again turned out to be useless. Finally, we began with the most unreliable installation files that had resided in my Laptop for ages. Result: Well not only was the setup working properly but also, it was the most updated version available.
By the time we figured out the right set of files, Anand (ex-event incharge) was there to help us out. With three pairs of hands we completed the installation in about 3 hours and were set to go by approximately 1 AM. Now, having stayed there till this time, Dheeraj was not willing to turn in by 10 AM and Anand was on official leave. One of the worst things about being the event incherge is that you have to do everything that nobody else wants to do, and so I was the one who had to give-up his beautiful dreams at the cost of watching some gamers take on each other with Guns and Bombs (not Roses).
Like the last day, not much was supposed to change and everything was expected to be disorganized today as well. I reached the lab at around 9:45 AM, and two teams were already there, for the records: Tropicana and Distrukt. I know organizers should show-up before the participants, but aren’t participants supposed to be always late. There was nothing much I could do with them being there 15 minutes before time. We began the first match and Dirtrukt destructed all the hopes of Tropicana. In the meanwhile, Arnab Dutta (VP Programming, AIS) and Dheeraj Mehta joined me.
Next in line was: Baaraso Chabbis who competited against Tropicana (As there was no other team available). I guess they must not have had the Tropicana juice to give them the winning strength, lost again and knocked out of the tournament. ABS_Noobs played against Underdogs. Now, I am not sure what the full form of ABS was, but I highly doubt it was funny, lost and knocked out. Sector 62 (From Noida, India) never allowed Head Shot to take one, and knocked them out. Dota Rulez wasted so much time on playing Dota that there was not much to compete for AKAD_4. Finally, we were left with one last team, Team (For the sake of confirmation, this team had named themselves as Team).
It was almost 1 PM by now, and all of us (I, Arnab and Dheeraj) were very hungry. There is not much I could demand for with Kailash Gajara (President, AIS) and Darshak Kakkad (Senior VP Programming) being around. Very generously, they offered to order Pizza. No way was I going to deny that. Besides, how could have I ever let the opportunity go to show my great knowledge about ordering Pizzas. I bagged us great discounts on the order.
Team competited against Dheeraj Mehta and others who just formed a team Day Dreamers, choosing 3 random guys. The whole idea was to not give Team a pass to the next round. It turned out that Team lost to Day Dreamers and were knocked out. There were six teams left for the second round: Distrukt, Baaraso Chabbis, Underdogs, Sector 62, AKAD_4 and Day Dreamers.
The destruction of Distrukt stopped when Sector 62 defeated them. In a tight match Baaraso Chabbis knocked off Underdogs and Day Dreamers (whose task was to lose in the first match itself) humiliated AKAD_4 in a one-sided encounter.
The final round was a round-robin between three teams: Sector 62, Baaraso Chabbis and Day Dreamers. We had an exhaustive round of shooting and the three teams stood tied at 1 - 1 - 1. Not much could be decided on that score, so we had another round of encounters. As expected, the result was the same. By now, the final round had already taken 2 hours and the score was 2 - 2 - 2. With no other organizer left to give me an opinion, I had no idea how to adjudge a winner. It was already 6 PM and all I had seen in the entire day was a bunch of terrorists trying to bomb various targets. It would have been a little easier had it been peaceful, but people usually carry guns along, when they plan to bomb a place. It was not very different for the players. Everyone was ready to quit and go home without taking the prizes. As a very brave organizer I showed that I was the one in command and demanded the game to go on until we had a winner. The participants were forced to play another round, only this time there was no gun. All that the players were carrying was a knife, with the only aim of murdering their opponent.
I had no idea what I would do, incase of another tie, so I only prayed for one team to win the tournament. Fortunately, my prayers yielded result and we had a winner. The final standing was, Winner: Sector 62, Runner Up: Baaraso Chabbis and Second Runner Up: Day Dreamers. At this point I must admit that there was nothing much to choose between the three teams. It was just a matter of chance that one proved to be better than the others.
For the records, the teams that participated were:
1) Sector 62: Ankit Sharma, Akshay Shukla, Mayank Misra and Saurabh Dhupar
2) Baaraso Chabbis: Jay Negandhi, Vinit Reddy, Ankur Saxena and Ankit Mehta
3) Day Dreamers: Manish Mahajan, Sahil Raman, Dheeraj Mehta and Balaji
4) AKAD_4: Karan Khokhani, Arvinder Sehinsra, Deepesh Nair and Ankit Shah
5) Underdogs: Sumeet Parwe, Parag Salve, Ketan Sharma and Omkar Thorar
6) Distrukt: Nimish Sinha, Pathik Shah, Chintan Turakhia and Deepak Yadav
7) Team: Karthik Raman, Virag Parekh, Tarun Bala and Varun Khadilkar
8) Dota Rulez: Malhar, Abhishek, Manan and Shamik
9) Head Shot: Rajat Shah, Harsh Mehta, Jay Thakkar and Siddharth Patel
10) ABS_Noobs: Venkatesh Hanamsagar, Subash Rao, Vinu Krishna and Abhinav KB
11) Tropicana: Nisarg Desai, Souranshu Banerjee, Devesh Mittal and Karthik Anand
In the end, I would like to thank all the participants for making this event a wonderful and entertaining one. I would like to thank Dheeraj, Arnab and Anand in organizing the tournament with so much of success. Kailash and Darshak deserve special thanks for showing up and more so for ordering the Pizzas. Also, another man who deserves more than just a mention is Bharathwaj Nandkumar. Not only is he always there to guide us for all the AIS events but also, sponsors prizes from time to time. Thanks to his generosity, we gave away game DVDs as prizes to the Winners and the Runner Ups.