My, oh my... what a day it was during the streams of Day 1 at GESL. Mixed thoughts, but hopefully during Day 2 today, the negative thoughts are quelled. As usual, I'm going to tell it like it went down, no filler or fluff. Let's get into it.

Day 1 started out as an absolute disaster, but leveled out during the afternoon and into the late night games. Just a quick note -- all times I'm about to mention are pacific time (California time) -- you can convert them if you so choose -- just add like 9 hours. So the LAN was scheduled to start at like 10am; it didn't start until 1, and due to internet problems and unicorns breaching the venue, it was delayed another 30-45 minutes. With nearly no interaction from staff members or stream moderators, the TL thread along with the stream chat were going nuts, trying to find a way to be in the know. Luckily enough, a few casters went to Twitter and shot out a few tweets to let the gamers know what was going down -- turns out the internet at the college failed, and it was going to be back up shortly.

After everything evened out and the LAN finally started, things were looking good. The casters were great and explained what was going on in-game; not really any complaints except for the awkward pauses during the stream just randomly when they didn't know who was supposed to talk, and on the contrary to that, both of them talking at the same time over one another's voice. A few screams here and there weren't really necessary as the engagements weren't that amazing, but overall a great job.

John Clark of CSN's explanation of the technical issues:

The stream itself I hope to see some improvement today, as we're creeping up on the 2 hour mark from the start time this fine Saturday morning (evening where you Euros are, I'd assume). Going off the last point of improvement, I want to see some replay analysis or giveaways or some players talking and fooling around during the cooldown between games -- I don't want to start at a scrolling screen of textfor 45 minutes. Although this is indeed a LAN taking place at a college with mostly college staff, I'm sure they could have some events or games that we could watch them play opposed to a blank logo screen with small 12pt Arial font at the bottom saying "Be back soon!".

The games are what made the entire day for me. Each and every game from each and every person was simply amazing. We saw an MLG-level series twice from Kawaii, both TvT's, one of which he won the other where he fell to Ryung. Nearly every game in the series was over 45 minutes in-game time, and one of them peaking just over an hour. It's so fun to watch two high level players battle it out against each other in a mirror matchup, we need more of those. The Zerg players really macro'd up this tournament opposed to the fast rushes we saw during MLG (aside from DRG's 6-base-in-1-minute strategy which he won the tournament with). The Protoss at GESL also seemed to go more warpgate-heavy than robo or higher tier, something that's in the norm but fun to watch due to the amount of micro necessary to correctly position units and all that jazz. Nothing much more to say other than I'm a bit worried about viOLet dropping a game last night making him 2-1 and 3rd in his group, and I'm very eager to see how Dream, the 15 year old phenom, performs today -- he's leading his group (the same as viOLets) 3-0 with a 6-0 flawless record throughout his games. Look forward to more coverage later on today.



Make sure you know what's up. GESL coverage HERE.