As a casual traveller, if you arrived at the Perth domestic airport late on a blustery Wednesday night ready for a red-eye flight from Perth, you probably couldn't help but think these loud, obnoxious travellers that were sharing an overpriced beer and two of which were wearing shirts saying "ecence" or "fishballz", are probably too excited to be in your company. Even worse if you were sharing the same Virgin Blue flight across Australia to the sunshine state, where you would learn how the words "moist",  "thats true" and "lets be honest" could get so annoying. However, if you were one of those loud, obnoxious travellers, you didn't give a shit what the typical traveller thought, but instead you were probably thinking about the chance to show some arrogant, cocky, bantering, eastie CSers (sponny) that you can actually play.

Skip back 5 and a bit weeks and the journey of Playmakers Gamers Choice really started. Beating past Western Australian champions such as gameover and merge along with the slut team aimazing, featuring WA's best, ferg, PGC were crowned the WA ECN qualifier winners, taking home a huge prize pool of $250, the amount that paid for about half of anh's flight, and bragging rights over the rest of the 10 keen WA players. Two or Three nights of prac per week followed all in the hope of winning enough scrims to make it out groups and into the top 8 in Australia.

Arriving at the Brisbane airport at about 5AM, half an hour ahead of schedule, we decided to take a maxi to our apartment building in Spring Hill. Realising it didnt open its reception until 8AM and let us check in at about 10.30 at the earliest, the lovely couple and the cute chick at the cafe just next to the reception had our company for the next few hours. After a trip into the heart of Brisbane in search of a Razer Goliathus that was left in Perth and to find out how to get to the casino all before 10AM, we could all tell it would be a long day. Fortunately to lift our spirits, with some divine intervention, a lovely taxi driver who was driving us back from the casino to our apartment picked us up. With possibly the best one-liner of our week, after getting cut off by another taxi driver, our man let fly with an f-bomb and a racial slur, "you fucking indian" in what I am pretty certain was a Pakistani accent. Nevertheless, we were given access to the apartment that would be scene of many great times over the course of the next four days. Discovering a pretty solid view over Brisbane city, the excitement got the best of our chain-smoking-friend anh, as his clothes disappeared and genitalia appeared, flopping out and pulling off the infamous 'party boy' just for Matt, our 'manager'. Needless to say the rest of the afternoon was spent having nanna naps and getting the essentials from Woolworths. With night approaching and with a half of the travelling party looking for some greenery, our friend Luke (Rahv1N) helped us out. The rest of the night was spent conversing, watching e-@thletes and even some South Park, courtesy of Luke's DVD player and DVD collection.

Late into Friday morning we all awoke ready to head down to Elysium for some pre-nats prac, after all we were here to play CS. After still not finding the Goliathus we ventured back into the city and once recieving some really horrible advice from one JB Hi-Fi worker that they "do not sell mousepads" we found the pad, just downstairs. We arrived at Brunswick Street mall a bit dazed as to where the LAN centre was until we found the small entrance in between a Nandos ripoff and the police beat. After three successive losses to our Group A rivals, v300, we left just as night was falling. In trade for a small couch for the night another new friend would arise in kemz. After another night  in the PGC apartment balcony, we all set alarms and prepared ourselves(crashed) for match day the next morning.

Aswell as the smell of bacon and eggs, the sound of the smoke alarm ringing as once again, Dave forgot to use the fan, ECN was upon us. After a quick breakfast we all headed to Elysium early to try and prepare as best we could for a good morning of CS. Being one of the first teams to arrive, we set up and waited for the rest of group A to arrive. The now famous red bowl made an appearance to select the map rotation for group A and to our delight, tuscan was to be played first, when our bye was scheduled. Many fist bumps were exchanged despite having to wait another hour to get underway. After a few technical difficulties on Australia's only Tony Hawk's Pro Skater player, Burton's, computer, the group was underway. Our first matchup was to be against Queensland hopefuls and the second seed for group A, Qlimax, on de_train. After defeating mEx on tuscan and wearing the most impressive gaming hoodies in Brisbane, Qlimax put up a strong terrorist half achieving 7 rounds to our 8. Fortunately for us, a few fakes and picks allowed us to take the second half 8-7 and the game 16-14. After being fired up after a big, unexpected win, we came to verse the nation's capital's best, Abyss. Starting out as terrorist on dust2, some solid defence allowed them to surprise us and take the half 9-6, with a second group A upset brewing in two matches. We rallied however and dominated the second half of our match taking it 13-2 and the match 19-11. The last hurdle for us to overcome in order to make it to the finals on Sunday would be against maius Exordium. Roughly, we had figured out if we win about 12 or more rounds and put up a solid showing in our last group match against v300, we would progress, but more importantly we had to focused on the win. The map would be inferno, something we were both comfortable and confident to take out. Starting as counter-terrorists after another coin toss won (100% success rate!), some nifty usp work by anh in alley won us a 2v4 pistol round and gave us some early match momentum. We carried on with this and ended up taking out the half 9-6, putting us in a good position to both win the match and solidify our position in the final 8. The second half was much like the first, an armwrestle. With no momentum to either side, it relied on execution of strategies and the ability to make crucial frags to take the rounds. At 15-14 in our favour, it was left down to ecence to clutch a 1v2 and win us the match. Camped in pit he claimed both scalps and with that, he sealed the win. After the winning cigarette and team chat we were left to play v300 in what was certain to be our toughest game of the day on what we considered both a relatively weaker map of ours, and a strong map for our opponents. After choosing CT on nuke we almost managed to squeeze out the majority of the rounds, narrowly losing the half 7 to 8. As terrorists, it was a different story, with all of our attacks either fast or slow, being completely shut down and we were unsuccessful in winning one round, losing 8 in a row. With the competition already running behind due to early technical difficulties, and the rest of the match not bearing any significance on the outcome, both teams decided it was unnecessary to delay the competition further and left extremely happy with the day.

After getting Subway (which by the way is more expensive in Brisbane than in Perth) and returning to the apartment for a quick break, we returned to Elysium to observe both remaining groups. With Aftershock and exile5 looking strong, we once again made the trek back to the apartment with the sole intention of a quiet beer or two at the bar downstairs and a quiet night. Instead Reece, Matt and myself, after being kicked out of said bar because as Matt recalls..."after 9pm all guys get kicked out, its female night" we hopped into our second-favourite taxi for the trip and listened to the taxi driver playing the drums to the beat of Michael Jackson's Thriller on his steering wheel for the quick trip to the casino. After a few drinks in quick succession, some blackjack and chats to some dealers, fellow players and bar staff, we decided to head home to the remaining trio. Not realising how intoxicated we had become, we were denied a taxi trip and had to go by foot back to our apartment. I believe the rest of that night was well documented via a few videos of the shenanigans and i'll leave that up to your own eyes.

We woke up early again ready to face the new challenges of the top 8 in Australia. We found quickly the remaining teams and then the red bowl came out to draw who would be playing who. Unfortunately for us, the team who we did not want to verse moreso than the others, Aftershock, was drawn to play us. After both captains choosing to veto tuscan the remaining four maps were put into the bowl and it turns out train and nuke would be the first two maps to be played. Losing the knife round on train and getting the terrorist side would leave us with no chance to put up serious competition, not able to string together successful rounds or gain any momentum, losing 13-2 and effectively shutting the door on winning the first map of the bo3. After losing pistol our suspicions were confirmed and we could not win another round, losing a disappointing 16-2 and dashing our hopes. We still had one more map to prove to both ourselves and Australia that we could put rounds on good teams and as terrorists on nuke, put on 4 rounds to aShock's 11 and gave us a slender opportunity to win the map. This was not to be however and we traded rounds and eventually lost 4-5 in the second half and the game 16-8. With our day done in terms of CS, the long wait until our 8PM flight back to Perth commenced. To lift everyones spirits however, we found out where the Krispy Kreme store was and drowned our sorrows in hundreds of delicious calories. After being ripped off by the maxi taxi driver on our way to the airport, we checked in, had an explosives test, checked out the numerous moisties that by way of fate were also at the airport, chatted to eventual second place getters conz, kruz, ferg and choobie and settled in for a long flight home, conveniently for me, next to the two biggest people in Australia, with snoring louder than gazr's screaming.

On behalf of PGC, I would like to thank everyone who helped run ECN, primarily gomez and unpro, with great coverage once again being provided by beedee and the dicevip crew. Our congratulations go to team immunity, you were well deserving winners. I would also like to thank anyone who turned up and supported us, introduced yourself or even borrowed a couch for the night, the trip wouldn't of been as memorable without you. I know we all hope to see everyone next time and hopefully have as much of a good time, if not a better time at the next nationals. Last but not least, a massive thanks also go to our sponsor and good friend Johan at Gamers Choice in Joondalup, who has helped us out with free prac sessions and money so that we could make the trip over.