1st: Natus Vincere ($50,000)
2nd: fnaticMSI ($20,000)
3rd: SK Gaming ($8,000)
4th: Team EG ($4,000)

Maps of the Grand Final in Counter-Strike:

Final Standings of Quake Live:

1st: Shane 'rapha' Hendrixson ($10,000)
2nd: Anton 'Cooller' Singov ($4,000)
3rd: Maciej 'Av3k' Krzykowski ($1,600)
4th: Alexey 'Cypher' Yanushevsky ($800)

• The Short Cut Keyboard
  
• Mandy Wafer Bill 32
  
• Trailers and videos from the Intel Extreme Masters
  
• The NERD-MACHINE
  
• And more!

Quake Live on ESL TV:

How can I increase my chances to win?

Key fact summary:

Comment the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship news
Every single news can be one of the two winning news items
From these two news one comment each will be picked
Be that lucky commentator to win one of the prizes
Closing Date: Tuesday, 9th of March

The prizes:

COMPACT DESIGN 3 THUMB-KEYS ANTI-GHOSTING CAPABILITY HIGH DURABILITY		NANO PATTERN IMPROVED AXIS FLOW COMFORTABLE GAMING SIZE RUBBERIZED BACKING

See the Group A matches live on ESL TV and ESL Radio:

The final standings of World of Warcraft:

Continental Champions still able to make a Double

See the Group A matches live on ESL TV and ESL Radio:

Björn Metzdorf, Director IT

Since yesterday, we have been under attack by a malicious bot net. More than 1,000 IPs constantly flooded our data lines. For events of this size, we employ two redundant firewalls for our 100 MBit hard line by the German Telekom.

While our firewalls were able to block the incoming packets, the sheer amount of packet flood completely filled up the internet connection leading to our hall. You can see this on the attached graphs showing when the attacks happened today and their ferocity. This made it impossible to log on to the online parts of World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike and Quake Live, causing both drops and lags, and thus a tremendous amount of delay.

Unfortunately, just like on the streets, you can never be completely safe from criminals seeking to disturb and profit off of the general public. Still, we are constantly working on countering all attacks together with Deutsche Telekom and CeBIT organizer Deutsche Messe AG. Now, late on Wednesday we have been successful, so that World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike 1.6 are back on track and Quake Live can be resumed tomorrow.

Make no mistake: Making the tournament run smoothly and ensuring a consistent, high-quality coverage is our highest priority.

Michal 'Carmac' Blicharz, Product Manager

Dear Quake Fans,

The Intel Extreme Masters World Championship has experienced delays in the schedule due to technical difficulties with the Quake Live LAN server. The remaining Group A matches are moved to Thursday and will be finished after the Group B matches.

The players have been experiencing high pings (50+) on the LAN servers. The ESL IT staff have found no problems with the network (the server was also connected directly into the switch the Quake Live section was on, which did not help). There also seems to be nothing wrong with the server software that would cause this problem.

To address the issues we delayed the tournament matches and restarted it online later in agreement with the players (the ping to Frankfurt servers is less than 10). Later on, due to DDoS attacks on our network and one player's technical difficulties (which no player was able to solve), a decision was made to continue the tournament on Thursday.

At the moment id Software is working with the ESL IT to build another server in order to make sure that the game will be played on LAN for the remainder of the event. We are doing our best to address the situation.

I am very sorry that we were not able to deliver the optimal spectating experience today. I would like to sincerely apologise for the situation. We will do our very best and more to deliver the optimal spectating experience on three of the remaining days of the tournament.

World Championship Schedule

Tuesday, 2nd March
Wednesday, 3rd March
Thursday, 4th March
Friday, 5th March
Saturday, 6th March

World Championship Prize Purse

1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5/6th 5/6th 7/8th 7/8th 9/10th 9/10th 11/12th 11/12th

CS1.6 $ 50,000 $ 20,000 $ 8,000 $ 4,000 $ 3,000 $ 3,000 $ 2,000 $ 2,000 $ 2,000 $ 2,000 $ 2,000 $ 2,000 $ 100,000

WoW $ 25,000 $ 10,000 $ 4,000 $ 2,000 $ 1,500 $ 1,500 $ 1,000 $ 1,000 $ 1,000 $ 1,000 $ 1,000 $ 1,000 $ 50,000

QL $ 10,000 $ 4,000 $ 1,600 $ 800 $ 600 $ 600 $ 400 $ 400 $ 400 $ 400 $ 400 $ 400 $ 20,000

Twelve teams participate, six in each group
Group stage will be played in Best-of-1
Playoffs will be played in Best-of-3 and Single Elimination
First team of each group directly advance to playoffs
Second and third play a relegation, winners advance to playoffs
Mappool: de_dust2, de_inferno, de_nuke, de_train & de_tuscan

Twelve teams participate, six in each group
Group stage will be played in Best-of-5
Playoffs will be played in Best-of-7 and Single Elimination
First team of each group directly advance to playoffs
Second and third play a relegation, winners advance to playoffs

Twelve players participate, six in each group
Group stage will be played in Best-of-3
Playoffs will be played in Best-of-5 and Single Elimination
First player of each group directly advance to playoffs
Second and third play a relegation, winners advance to playoffs
Mappool: qzdm6, qzdm13, qztourney7, qztourney9 & ztntourney1

World Championship Groups:

Group A fnaticMSI mousesports oXmoze mTw int. Team EG UMX

Group B SK Gaming Roskilde Ravens KerchNET MeetYourMakers compLexity Syndicate Wemade Fox




Group A Team Dignitas x6tence.wow hehe xo SK Korea SK Gaming USA Fnatic.WoW

Group B SK GAMING Sansibar SK Gaming WOW PvP EU Button Bashers iNNERFiRE compLexity.Black Evil Geniuses




Group A Shane 'rapha' Hendrixson Chance 'Chance' Lacina Maciej 'av3k' Krzykowski Anton 'Cooller' Singov Alessandro 'stermy' Avallone Zhibo 'Fan Zhibo' Fan

Group B Tim 'DaHanG' Fogarty Thomas 'griffin' Wall Alexey 'cypher' Yanushevsky Kévin 'strenx' Baeza Magnus 'fox' Olsson Brian 'dkt' Flander