Last Easter a small LAN party in Lithuania made a splash in stagnating waters of offline competition by luring a two British teams, including a handful of Premiership players, to the unknown lands somewhere off to the east of Blighty for the first Team Fortress 2 tournament to be featured at the event. That was InfoShow 2014, an annual convention organised by students and staff of Kaunas University of Technology’s Faculty of Informatics student union, InfoSA.
This is BETA LAN 2014, the gaming-focused offshoot brought to you by Žaismo DNR, CyberLeague.eu and InfoSA hosted on the same campus. Alongside League of Legends, HeartStone and StarCraft II, we will witness Team Fortress 2 making its debut. The ripples from the success of InfoShow are clearly visible as European marauders from every corner of the continent are set to converge on Kaunas this weekend 24th-26th October.
Enticed by not only by the promise of a favourable exchange rate and a myriad of local brews, but by the raft of sponsors stepping up to back the event. ZOWIEGEAR have collaborated with their regional distributor GGWP.pro and come in once again to show love to the competitive scene as the title sponsor for the tournament, offering up 6x ZOWIE EC2 eVo Black gaming mice for the last team standing, 6x ZOWIE Camade White cable management devices for the runners-up and 6x ZOWIE N-CM Blue mouse pads for the third placed team.
Don’t forget that there will also be a soon-to-be-confirmed cash prize pool with a 60% / 30% / 10% split between the top three teams. That’s not all! Serial event sponsors TF2Pickup.net and whitelist.tf are also throwing their weight behind the tournament with a heap of Mann Co. Keys to ease the pain of our 4th and 5th place finishers. Surely by now I’ve convinced you that the stakes are high for our plucky competitors? No?! Then wrap your eyeballs around these babies! Ultra-exclusive in-game medals for all participants created by Psyke and recently added to the game by Valve.
Tournament mastermind, huhy, has kicked the BETA LAN TF2 publicity machine in to overdrive bringing in editor of the moment, Salade au Thon, whipping up a promotional video following on his magnificent TF2 Connexion Movie Contest winning entry, “French are Fucking Awesome”.
A greater man than I once said “always leave them wanting more”, so check back here on Friday for more details on the tournament itself including brackets, teams, rosters and TFTV’s plans for live streamed coverage for when tournament gets underway from 09:00CEST on Saturday 25th October.