The CPL Winter Painkiller Tournament has now started up in earnest with Round 2 half completed. After a poor showing by a good number of competitors, only 79 started from a bracket of 128. Up until the 3rd round, all matches are single elimination. This has meant a number of good players have already left us with the match ups pitching some good players against each other. Below is a recap on the Round 2 games thus far (Round 1 lost none of the “named players with the exception of 4K^Tobes)

Finished (Round2)

Vo0 vs exe 38-0/52-3
Clearly a tough start for Vo0. I hope his performance picks up for the future rounds 😉

Deatz vs elpajuo 13-8/24-6
This on paper looked a tough match up. I would have expected Deatz to come through this match victorious after seeing his play online. Elpajuos online record not being the best with early knockout in the US tournament STFUandPLAY vs Lunat1c and other competitions.

Lexer vs Zaccubus 28-7/35-15
One of the newest members of 4Kings bites the dust early in another tough match up. The scoreline indicates that Lexer was just too strong for Zaccubus and took both maps with a fairly substantial frag ratio. Lets hope Zaccubus can spur his comrade Kuula onto the next round and beyond.

Xhep vs ZuluOmegaDelta 36-2/42-5
Looks like a walk in the park for Xhep as he decimates the unknown player ZuluOmegaDelta. Zulu had a bye from the first round against Vegeta so it is hard to tell if this player had any quality.

neok vs zhrance 19-1/17-13
Both of these players are well known on Euro turf. Zhrance has played in previous pkeuro tournaments and has demonstrated an above average skill level. I think Neok has been training hard for this tournament and it seems to have paid off with a fairly substantial score on map 1 (this being zhrances choice as the higher seed), and what looks to have been a close game on Map 2. I hope this match had demos! 🙂

ztrider vs M0erser 72-58
This is a strange one as the official brackets indicate ztrider won this match, while ztrider himself has commented on pkeuro that he in fact lost. 72-58 certainly seems to be a weird scoreline unless they were playing in the map big_box (q3 players will know what I mean 😉 ). Hope to find out what happened here soon.

Upcoming (Round2)

–Daler vs Wieee
–Aphextwin vs Whipboy
–C_Lains vs TAU|$hield
–Stermy vs Thump4
–Stelam vs Gnosis
–Kuula vs pfb
–zyz vs DeusMortis
–Slayer vs zen
–Aim vs Zyos

Most of the above matches look very winnable for the Euro contingent. The matches that should provide possible dramas are Daler vs Wieee (will be tough for Wieee to overcome a strong Daler), Kuula vs pfb (is Kuula even there?!?) and Slayer vs zen (zen is a well known good player. This will be a very close match). Good luck to all those involved! Matches start at 4pm UK time. Keep in touch with the scores at the official CPL brackets HERE.

Coverage of the matches is being provided partially by TSN with an excellent video shoutcast. Open up the following link in Windows Media Player v7.10.00.3059 for best service. VIDEO LINK. Last nights coverage of the Painkiller matches was a little poor but we hope it will perk up tonight. Xyber, who plays Gellehsak tonight (unlucky!) was featured wopping poor ICEMAN. The video of the game was okay when you could get a stable 321kb/s source from the relays. We found the best way to achieve this was to keep switching relays using WMP7. Try it out!

**UPDATE** Demos are now available on the CPL FTP at this url: