What a life I get to live, I sit at home all day practicing for our next big tournament and interact with Aussie and international gamers and I get paid for it! All I ever do is practice my own game while I’m waiting for my next overseas holiday… I WISH! A CGS tournament is far from a holiday, in fact for a majority of the time we are at events we don’t get much time off at all and am often busy for more then 12 hours a day. This is because when we are competing in a CGS event or at a CGS function we are working hard for our money, doing everything possible to get a TV show up and running. What many Aussie fans forget is that we are a part of a television show that streams live to over 400 million potential viewers across five continents. The fact that the show isn’t yet broadcast in Australia gets a bit frustrating for some wanting to watch the action. I’m not suggesting that our job is hard, it’s a breeze if you enjoy it and is made even easier considering it has been a dream of mine for a long time.

So what do we do when we aren’t competing? Why do we spend weeks at events when the competition is only a few days long? Well other than being audience for the other teams (some we have formed strong friendships with) there are a lot of tasks that require our attention. I’ll give you a rundown of our most recent event which was the 2008 CGS Pan Asian Championship held in Wuhan China (The hole competition was condensed into a short segment for television so the filming wasn’t as intensive.)


Day 1

It’s the early hours of Monday morning and we are waiting at Sydney Airport, most of us had arrived in Sydney the day before and we are all waiting to board our 7am flight to Melbourne. After a short stopover in Melbourne some of us are looking forward to a 9 hour flight to Guangzhou, China were another 4 hour stop over awaits us before our final domestic flight to the city of Wuhan. After about 20 hours of flights and stop-overs we finally land in Wuhan at around 11pm local time, then we jump on a bus that CGS had waiting to take us on the hour long drive to the hotel (there was a brief wait on the bus ride due to some rather funny road rage incidents). A brand new hotel, decked out with welcome signs that literally opened for players and staff to stay at during the event. Being the first ever guest in a hotel room is awesome and I couldn’t have asked more from CGS as they always give us the best in regards to accommodation. Being after 1am we were all tired and just stayed in the lobby long enough to learn about the 8am sharp player meeting in the morning. Now when I say sharp I mean sharp, after one late entrance CGS will make sure you are never late again, in fact the first 20 minutes of the meeting involved us being told how expensive every minute we are late can become. It’s 9.30am and we had all the orientation and introductions out of the way and a stern warning about how hectic our schedules will be. Being the major opening of the first ever permanent purpose built eSports stadium it’s understandable that we will be busy most of the week. We were then herded to the back of the room where one by one our photos were taken for the team websites and some more paper work was awaiting our attention. At 10:30am we left the hotel for the stadium so that we could get a rough idea about what to expect over the next week. We walked into an unfinished stadium and were assured that the stadium and the almost empty festival floor space would all be completed and ready for the morning. I thought, HaHa Good luck, A comment that was met with obvious amazement when the next day everything was magically ready.

Anyway back to the first day; we had a chance to sit around the stadium and have a quick look around as well as a few rehearsals while everyone sat patiently waiting their turn. As you soon get to realize, nothing ever goes to plan in showbiz and sometimes you are left with unexpected delays of hours. It’s 3 in the afternoon and the Underground team is rushed off to a bus waiting outside the complex for a special film shoot CGS had prepared. Travel is not an issue with CGS when it comes to filming so it’s normal for a ride to a film shoot to take anywhere from 1 – 4 hours. So 2 hours later its 5:30pm and its beginning to get dark, we were on a huge river somewhere which was to be the location for the shoot. A short wait for the American film crew and we found ourselves walking along some extremely narrow ‘walkways’ over the river, the idea was for us to appear to be walking on water. We continue to film player introductions and features until it becomes too dark to continue then board the bus for our return journey to the hotel. We arrived at the hotel around 7:30 and were actually late to the CGS dinner which I sat through and pretended I liked the traditional food supplied (yum bread and butter over pig trotters and braised frog). It’s now about 8:30 and we finally have some time to ourselves, however everyone is too tired to do anything except sleep after a 12 hour day.

Day 2

7:30am and we are back in the restaurant enjoying a buffet breakfast, real food this time, bacon, eggs, sausages etc. Its 8am and we get back to the hotel lobby… No I lie… We got to the lobby at 8:10am and we didn’t hear the end of it about us being late. Ben assured the CGS staff that none of would be late again and boy did he make that clear to us! Like I said, ‘time is money’. It’s now 8:20 and we board the busses to the stadium with our hearts pumping fast in anticipation of being the first ever team to compete at the stadium facility against the current Pan Asian Champions, Singapore Sword. Rehearsals are completed and every player is eagerly awaiting the commencement of their game; God can we just start I was pumped up 2 hours ago, 11am and we are off. Our first game against Singapore was a tough one with Counter-Strike finishing off with a 9-0 half and the final score being 24-19 to Sydney Underground. Now each game takes about 1.5 – 2 hours to complete if nothing goes wrong, obviously it was the first ever event at the venue so there were some length delays on day 1 of competition.

The last match of the day also happened to involve us and our host the Wuhan Dragons. Before the game can start government officials turned up to officially open the stadium accompanied by a lot of press and some fireworks. Can we start already? I was pumped up for this one 6 hours ago! The match finished with counter-strike once again and we managed to come out on top 14-4 securing the overall win for our team. I have forgotten the time but it was dark outside and we only had 30 minutes to get back to the hotel, get dressed and get our buts to the welcome dinner. We got to the dinner on time and were welcomed by local government officials and CGS staff as we are seated to a tradition Chinese feast. Yet again we are free to do what we wanted around 9pm after a 13 hour day, but all we want to do is get some real food (unlike Ben, topguN and Berzerk! I dislike Camel hump and braised frogs).

Day 3

Boy did we get an earful at 8am in the lobby, most teams had players arriving late to the dinner last night and we spent awhile relearning the phrase, time is money. I’m beginning to wake up 2 hours early every morning because I’m afraid of being late! Yesterday 4 games were played and it took a huge amount of time, today there are 5 games and we are only involved in 1, so more waiting is the flavor of the day. Fatal1ty asked the counter-strike team to go into the festival and play him in a promotional 1v4 quake 4 match on stage. It was only a 10 minute game but it seemed to take ages while fatal1ty sat there enjoying the 60 odd frags he got on us. It was an amazing experience, hundreds of people watched on as we got schooled in the art of quake.

10 Hour day

"Luckily for the guys Berzerk! managed to capture some of the game and grab a picture of their scores" - Ben

Day 4

Another 7am start if we wanted breakfast and today we were involved in 2 games against Dubai Mirage and Seoul Jinwha. It was another long day and our spare time was spent doing interviews and signing autographs, the supporters are off the chain!

11 hour day

Day 5

At the lobby again 8am sharp! Haven’t been late yet; Most of the players haven’t gotten more than 6-7 hours sleep as its almost impossible with these schedules. Our game is the last game today and a lot of the teams are required to stay back for photo shoots and interviews. Oh and a lot of retake… retake… retake… retake of us doing the same thing until we got the shot.

Yay we can drin… SLEEP… only an 8 hour day. Some of us went to ‘relax’ after our semifinal win and the entire team met up in the lobby at around 8pm for a few quite drinks. We soon filled the bar with the likes of fatal1ty, CGS staff and CGS admins joining us for a congratulations drink after we secured a spot in the World Finals. Once again everyone was quick to remind us that the bus left at 8am in the morning for more feature shoots and my brother was unfortunate enough to have to leave for his feature shoot at 6am.

Final Day

8am and yet another 2 hour bus trip to a destination that turned out to be a huge Chinese temple where we met up with Tegs who had already been there for several hours. I won’t go into full details on the day but a lot of time was spent on filming interviews and features for the team and individuals. This generally involves a lot of retakes, waiting and moving around to different locations.

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This is just one week in China for a production that was just a shortened highlights clip of the event; we will be in LA for weeks! The schedule won’t be as hectic but once again it will require some extremely long days and a lot of patience. Now we are back into to heavy practice and fulfilling local media commitments with TV and radio interviews being the norm. Of course this is all easy work for someone living a dream and doing what they enjoy. By no means am I saying that it’s hard work, just pointing out that we do work for our money and it involves a lot more than just playing!