The Worst Tournament in Counter-Strike History

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Throughout the history of Counter-Strike, numerous CS tournaments have been held, and inevitably, some have turned out to be disastrous. Recall the chaos at the Epic CS League or the huge delays at the Krakow Major.

However, there was one tournament whose terrible organization surpassed all others: Gaming Paradise.

Players had their documents confiscated, there were no graphics cards in the computers, the monitors were office-grade, and no one ever received the prize money.

In today’s article, we’ll talk about the worst LAN tournament in CS history.

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Let’s start from the beginning. Mr. B was an ordinary entrepreneur from Slovenia with no connection to esports.

The Slovenian owned a small company called Gaming Resorts, which created software upon request.

At some point, Mr. B had the brilliant idea to organize an esports event featuring four different games: CS, Dota, League of Legends, and Hearthstone. He didn’t want to host another large LAN at a stadium. Instead, he planned a “party tournament” where teams would compete during the day and drink cocktails by the Adriatic Sea in the evening.

Mr. B announced the tournament on behalf of his company, Gaming Resorts. He signed a contract with a small company with a very similar name — Gaming.rs. They were to handle organizational issues such as broadcasting, setting up computers, and assisting players. Mr. B’s only responsibility was to provide the funds on time.

Gaming Paradise was scheduled for September 6-8, 2015, and despite a major LAN from ESL in Dubai starting on September 10, many top teams agreed to attend the tournament. The reason for their agreement was the party atmosphere that Mr. B heavily promoted.

Here are some things he promised the players:

• Accommodation in luxury suites at a prestigious hotel on the Adriatic Sea.

• 50 types of premium beer.

• Constant access to jacuzzis and live music.

As a result, Na'Vi, Virtus.pro, and Titan flew to Gaming Paradise not as a serious tournament but as a small vacation before the major ESL LAN.

The first warning signs appeared early on. For example, of the four announced games, only two were left — CS and Dota tournaments, while the Hearthstone and League of Legends tournaments were quietly canceled.

Players started arriving at Gaming Paradise, and another problem arose. Almost no one received the promised $2000 per team for travel expenses.

The organizer explained that all his money was on a credit card with a daily limit of $3000. He talked to the organizations and promised to cover all expenses upon arrival. The teams agreed and flew at their own expense.

The transfer to the resort was also the organizers’ responsibility, but for unknown reasons, the buses were delayed. Players had to wait several hours until a minibus, which was barely big enough, picked them up. Arriving at the hotel at around 4 AM, the teams saw not the promised luxury suites but small apartments, one for each team. Many had to sleep on couches and floors. The hotel staff treated the players like trash, accustomed to wealthy yacht club visitors, and now dealing with a bunch of gamers whose stay had not been paid for.

It then became clear that there would be almost no spectators at the tournament. Later, the organizers admitted that they had heavily relied on ticket sales for revenue. They rented a 5000-seat arena and expected to sell at least 2000 tickets at $25 each. Do you know how many were actually sold? 200.

The ticket situation perfectly demonstrates the organizers’ incompetence. The last major tournament had 11,500 spectators, and that was a huge event with free entry.

The tournament was supposed to start on September 6 outdoors, but a storm hit the resort town of Portorož. Matches had to be postponed to the next day, and teams were told they would have to play two days' worth of matches in one day.

Returning to the hotel in a bad mood from the news, the Titan team found that the resort staff viewed them as scammers. The hotel workers had not yet received payment for their stay and saw no other option but to confiscate their passports and call the police. The players were very frightened as they needed to fly to a major LAN tournament in a few days, but their documents were being held by Slovenian authorities.

Fortunately, a compromise was later found. By the way, teams that tried to use the jacuzzis in their rooms were harshly refused by the hotel. The staff explicitly said that until their stay was paid for, they wouldn’t turn on the jacuzzis. The night somehow passed, and on the morning of September 7, the teams came to the half-empty arena to play matches. The players brought their own devices and encountered a small problem. There were no computers.

Did Mr. B forget about them?

It later emerged that the organizers did order computers from a Belgian cyber club. They hired two private drivers with minibusses to transport the hardware to Slovenia. One for the system units and another for the monitors. However, one of these drivers disappeared and couldn’t be contacted for a day. The second driver had already arrived in Belgium and was ready to pick up the order. He called Mr. B and said he didn’t have enough space to transport both the PCs and the monitors, so he had to choose one.

Obviously, in such a situation, you take the PCs, right?

But the organizer told the driver to take the monitors. Now they just needed to find PCs.

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Mr. B rented office computers from a small local company, and when they were brought to the arena and set up for the players, it turned out the hardware simply didn’t meet gaming requirements. They had old processors, and there were no graphics cards at all. The organizer ignored the old processors and started looking for graphics cards. He turned to local miners who rented him some of their equipment.

As a result, these computers barely ran CS at 100 fps, and when the teams tried to play on them, they found that the monitors from the Belgian cyber club were ordinary office monitors with a 60Hz refresh rate.

Players were ready to tolerate the performance, but playing on old monitors was not an option. They gave the organizers an ultimatum to find normal monitors with a proper refresh rate, or the tournament wouldn’t happen. Luckily, they managed to do this, and Gaming Paradise started. The delay for the first match was 25 hours, and the championship had to fit into two days. Because of this, many games, including the third-place match, were played in a Best of One format, and the Dota tournament had to be canceled altogether.

By that time, Gaming Paradise had become the most talked-about topic in the CS community. It wasn’t a small Tier 3 LAN, but featured top teams like Na'Vi, Virtus.pro, Titan, and Kinguin.

Fans wanted to watch matches of their favorite teams, especially at such a notorious tournament. But another unpleasant detail emerged. It turned out that Mr. B had made an exclusive streaming deal with MLGTV. And while that’s not inherently bad, the audience wasn’t properly informed, and many people, not finding the stream on Twitch, thought there was none at all. Those who knew about MLG TV suffered from constant lag and terrible quality, making it impossible to read player nicknames.

By then, people noticed that two legal entities were responsible for organizing the tournament: Mr. B’s Gaming Resorts and the contracted Gaming.rs. We mentioned this before. Previously, no one paid attention due to the similar names.

Gaming Resorts were responsible for the finances and had started avoiding questions by then. Gaming.rs handled on-site organizational matters and tried to accommodate the players. But their hands were tied.

Representatives of Gaming.rs openly stated they couldn’t reach Mr. B, and when someone did manage to talk to him, he gave no concrete answers, just laughed and assured them everything would be fine.

The second day of the tournament ended with two bad news.

Firstly, the Titan team, already shaken by the passport situation, faced another mishap. Two players and the manager went to the hospital after dinner and were diagnosed with mild food poisoning.

Secondly, all production equipment was confiscated by a company that Mr. B, like many others, hadn’t paid.

Those trying to keep the tournament afloat were left without lights, video cameras, and other necessary equipment. Mr. B admitted he had no money to pay the prize money and organized a meeting with the team managers to resolve the issue. They agreed that Mr. B would issue a document obligating him to pay the prize money within 90 days.

He did indeed issue this document, but it was signed not on behalf of Mr. B, but by his company, Gaming Resorts. This is an important detail to which we will return.

Returning to the arena the next day, the teams found it not only devoid of spectators but also of equipment. The company left only 10 computers. It looked like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie:

In the vast empty arena where spectators had roamed the day before, today there were only wires from the lighting and 10 lonely computers, cobbled together from office machines with Bitcoin mining graphics cards.

There was nothing else to do. With the help of Gaming.rs, the teams Virtus.pro, Titan, Na'Vi, and Kinguin set up the PCs and started playing the final matches.

In the end, Kinguin became the champions, and right after the tournament, the hype around it died down a bit. Players were in a hurry to leave as quickly as possible because the major ESL LAN started the next day. Kinguin’s lawyers, who had by then rebranded to G2, started negotiations with Gaming Resorts about the prize money.

After all, Mr. B had issued them a document promising to transfer the money within 90 days of the tournament’s end.

But remember, we mentioned that Mr. B signed the agreement on behalf of Gaming Resorts? This detail became crucial in Kinguin’s case. Mr. B simply filed for bankruptcy for his company, and since it had no assets, there was nothing to confiscate. In the end, no one received a cent of the prize money.

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