Tournaments
JohnNy_cz  /  14 Apr 2008, 12:40
Quake Nations Cup Semifinals
Yesterday we've seen two quarterfinal matches, and now it's time to prepare our seats for the semifinals, because that's the very first place in this tourney where the favourite teams fight each other for the first time. Let's have a look at the results and predictions...
Quake Nations Cup
Web: Winners' Bracket | Losers' Bracket | QuakeWorld National Teams
IRC: #quakers.ws
Admins: JohnNy_cz, Hawr1x, cuky

Quarterfinals - results
Germany - Sweden A
This match slipped under my hands, no announcing of it on IRC. From the scores it's rather clear that the favourites of this all-Quake tournament, team Sweden, had quite a good control on both maps, not giving away much frags.
I'm glad that Germany resolved their internal issues, because one week back it looked like they were going to discontinue their participation in the tourney. But after some "drama" talks (c) on German QW community site qwscene.net, situation has cleared out a bit. There were some disappointing reactions, but more importantly 1.2.3 jumped in, despite not being active in QW anymore, replacing those who weren't interested anymore.
As someone has said The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well. So *thumps up* to Germany for this!

Sweden C - Netherlands
This match was expected to be the most tight match in the quarterfinals, and it was true in the end. Report is under the link, so no more talk in here, just "gg" to Netherlands for the great action showed in the second half of Claustrophobolis.

Match between Finland and Sweden B resulted in a walk over for Finland. Quakers from Sweden B probably weren't too motivated to play the favourites of this tourney, and as their team leader nas wasn't online to force them to play that match, they were rather hiding & idling. It's rather a disappointment for me, because they have taken the 2nd Swedish post in this tourney, a sort of "special post" and we've expected clans on this posts to be the most active, the most hungry to play the matches, basically to participate. Well, I was assured that in Losers' bracket things will change and Sweden B will continue to play their games so I wish them good luck! Their next opponent is Poland B.

Semifinals
The are two matches in semifinals, first of them is Russia A vs. Finland. This can be considered as a kinda alternative NQR playoff round, because yesterday the eight playoff post slipped away from No Pasaran! by one point. They would meet The Viper Squad (the backbone of the Finnish team), in the first round, so this can be a little satisfaction to the Russians and I'm sure we will see a good fight here, with Finland being the favourite on dm3. Both teams don't play e1m2 too often, and we've seen Russia B team doing some serious damage to Russia A on that map in the quarterfinals, so most probably we are going to see dm3 and dm2 as the first two maps being played here.
From the results of their match against Poland B I'd expect Russia A to have quite good chances on dm2, as they have defeated Poland B there by a large margin while Poland B are dm2 specialists :-)

Netherlands vs. Sweden A
I think that this is going to be the most interesting match in Quake Nations Cup so far! reppie facing his clanmates bps, mawe, lakso and goblin, knowing how they play, exploiting their tactics in his fast & furious way, that's something I'm looking forward to see very much. Supported by Purity, member of Slackers 2 team and a base of Netherlands national teams throughout the QW history + Murdoc and Dragon, core members of the later Slackers era.
Add Xantom and with only a great names on the rosters of both teams, this will be definitely a star match to watch.
Judging by the carnage we've seen in the second half of the match against Sweden C, Netherlands have a high potential to take home at least dm2, on the other side it's hard to predict what map is the strongest for Sweden A, as they haven't met any opponent that'd cause a harm to them in this tourney yet.

In Losers' Bracket we've so far seen only match between Czech Quake and Poland B with Poland B showing the Czechs what is it like to take control over dm2, and they also showed a solid smart play in e1m2.
So this loss with unevitable walkovers due to reasons mentioned earlier, first round of Losers' bracket was the final station for teams Czech Quake, Austria, Poland A and Denmark.
Thanks to all for participating, all the team leaders did all they could, but maybe because this tourney took longer than expected, lots of players went into inactivity later and teams weren't able to put up four players to play the games anymore.

Current Losers' bracket looks like this and I wish all the teams good luck and good frag! :-)
I presume most of the games will get played again on "The QW Day", that is, this Sunday. Watch QW Schedule for more info about schedules.
Comments
2008-04-14, 14:45
Sweetly written <3
2008-04-14, 16:24
It's in loser's bracket the tournament really starts, so everything went according to plan yesterday. We noticed we were winning by a too large margin and as we didn't want a third map (bedtime etc) it was +forward mode on.

Now it's highway to finals!
2008-04-14, 21:45
Germany vs England coming up
2008-04-15, 15:09
Haha, I had absolutely no idea I was in the Swedish national team
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