Day 3: Saturday
Tournament play was supposed to continue at 9AM so voodoochopsticks and myself got up sometime past 8 to get ready. xrg decided to get some more sleep but was actually the only one to never shut up for the next full hour. :D He was kind enough to translate some from the Bible in English for us, only to find out later that it has a translated version in the second half of the book. Fail.

pod1 went to the showers as chop and myself left for the 5mins walk to DH, where blaze was already waiting for us to play our quarterfinals game. I quickly set up my stuff and tried to find a comfortable setup while playing some warmup with toxter. Apparently he took some sort of steroids or had a secret practise session during the night, either way I got slapped badly but wasn't supposed to play him anyway.
blaze kept coming up to me and told me about the tight schedule and how we really had to get our game going now, but pod1 was still missing. Some minutes later I was awarded a default win for the first map, and another 20mins or so I was told to unplug my stuff, receiving a default win and advancing to the semifinals. Yay prize money!

A bit later pod1 showed up who had been queueing for the corridor showers in the hotel for ages. He was informed about the default loss but didn't seem too bothered, and we all headed upstairs to get breakfast.
I kept talking to blaze about the lame default win and he and the head admins finally decided to let us replay the match, which we could actually do some time later. Neither pod1 nor myself played our best ever, but he was still easily cappable of beating me convincingly in two quick maps. Goodbye prize money! :(

Once we were done with the games, we gathered LuGia, lisk and Death to take the bus into town in order to have lunch and buy a few drinks for the evening. pod1 went for some whisky which turned out to be a crucial ingredient for his preparation for the finals against fox, and the rest of us got some cans of beer to balance.

Back at the event, we watched the semis between pod1 and toxter and afterwards fell into the usual DH routine of food, watching games, exploring the exposition area and so forth. We got bored of it quickly though so we went back to our hotel room and had a few drinks for the lazy afternoon. pod1's bottle of whisky got emptied in the process and the first couple of beers ended up the same way.

Back at the event, pod1 and fox played the CPM finals in a somewhat tight 3-mapper. The deciding map turned out to be cpm1a aka polemap, and pod1 did fairly well throughout almost all the game. Towards the end fox however managed to take over and secured his comfortable win with some insane killing sprees.

Many were not too happy with the map selection procedure at Dreamhack, which would always have the players first remove 1 map each, and then pick 1 each. Therefore the crowd never got to see pod1 play fox on cpm3a during the regular tournament as fox always dropped cpm3a against the top players. But fox and pod1 decided to play just this right after the official tournament, and everybody was glad to see some insane skills and frags on cpm3a after all.

After the CPM finals everybody got kicked out of the tournament area for the VQ3 and QW finals, and we headed to the Big Stage to follow the shoutcasting by Joe and 2gd. I left again to grab a sandwich before the games would actually start, but when I came back everybody was pointing at me and shouting my name. A tad confused I soon realised that there was something going on on stage, and as 2gd was already saying my name over the microphone by then, there was no way to chicken out really. So I ended up in a push-up competition against other gamers, which I comfortably managed to lose by one last push-up against the other remaining guy. He walked away with some Razer stuff while I got the laughter, but then again I already had that from the Razer booth anyway. Thanks for making me a volunteer and look like an idiot though, CPM crew! :D


Finally the finals would start and 2gd and Joe did a great job to keep the crowd excited during the 2 maps between av3k and strenx. av3k didn't give strenx much space to breathe, and in particular so on the second and final map. The game seemed decided rather early so once it was over me and some other players went on to discuss the whole thing with 2gd for a bit. A bit disappointed and not too much of a QW fan, I got the others convinced to go back to the hotel and relax some more.

Unfortunately the prize awarding ceremony was delayed endlessly by the CS 1.6 finals and awfully slow progress once that was over. So instead of getting done with it from 11PM or at least midnight on, we were stuck at the event until almost 3AM in the morning, waiting for the players to get their prizes so we could move out to the town centre and have some afterparty. By the time we were done most of the possible pubs and bars were surely closed though, so only a few tried their luck and went out to find some drinks. The rest headed back to the hotel to finish the last round of beers, and by the time we were done with those the ones who went into town already came back with a rather disappointed look on their faces. Out of drinks and tired from the endless waiting, we called it a day and were happy to go to sleep.