Week 2 of theSGL CSS Invite League is upon us, in assocation with Tournament.com, and Mark Thompson and Mark Harwood bring you their views!

I have just finished adding another 2gb of RAM to my pc to take it up to the 4gb I required to open the list of reschedules and wild cards from week one. OK, perhaps that's a little overstated but I was disappointed at the turn out level for the first round of matches on cpl_mill, happily most of the teams have agreed upon a new time slot and things are back on track again. I always get excited at the prospect of a new season and a check back through previous events (a hundred and six of them now in various game types) shows that most if not all of them have had a first week littered with matches that didn't go ahead and for the most part they all turned out just fine!

What a stonking match we had to kick us off last week though between Insignia Cadre and TeK-9. Two two teams went at it hell for leather and high degrees of skill were on show from both teams showing anyone watching just how competitive this league is going to be. Anyone thinking they could be in for an easy ride will be aware now they were sadly mistaken – the £5,000 first place prize will galvanise the teams and everyone will be fighting tooth and nail for every round. However you look at it, the standard for the rest of the event has been set and anyone wanting to walk away with the tournament.com prize pot is going to have to step it up and mix it at the highest levels, week in – week out.

We do have the first movie of the week under construction at the moment and it will be available for you to vote for your “play of the week”, the player of the week based on SkillTracker figures will be released tomorrow (Wednesday) and it just remains for me to remind you to place your bets on these matches (via theSGL where each match has a betting option which can be found from the “details” link by each fixture) and to point out that Gotfrag have picked up the event, it's not often you see Euro news on there so don't be shy of posting some comments and letting them know that they aren't wasting their time.

Week 2 see's our teams fighting it out on de_contra one of my favorite maps as it almost always leads to upsets. Contra is one of them maps that can be kinda hard to get a decent practice on outside of an active league season, so teams can tend to be a little rusty on Contra.

Im am highly looking forward to seeing Auxilia face Tek-9 as with the majority of ex-CSA players in the new Auxilia lineup it will be nice to see them also bring some of CSA dominance that they had on this map.

Another intresting match will be Logitech.FI against Infused Gaming, i have some high hopes for the revised Infused Gaming line up and i think if they can dominate Logitech.FI on contra it may just give them that little confidence boost they will be after.

Links: theSGL.com | Tuesday Previews