This article was intended to be finished earlier, but with all the excitement of Immunity's trip to Taiwan I felt it might have been swept under the rug. Anyhow, I thought for those who didn't compete in or weren't aware of the recent GotGames CSP comp it might serve interesting. 

GotGames recently held a one day CSP competition, following the release of CSP 1.04. The competition featured 32 teams in total and saw players from both the 1.6 and CSS communities compete for little more than bragging rights.

In comparison to the standards of 1.6, 32 teams playing for absolutely no prizes in an online competition is astounding. 1.6 team Nordland (davestr1zl bl4nk gamz coop kram lukeft dakkon) took out the comp, defeating Evil Monkeys (snake digz emagine spunj sai kurandus PaDz), a combination of both 1.6 and CSS players over three maps in a very close bo3 final. Final scores were:

NORDLAND vs Evil Monkeys [13-16] csp_train
NORDLAND vs Evil Monkeys [16-14] csp_dust2
NORDLAND vs Evil Monkeys [16-12] csp_inferno

Nordland's davestr1zl had this to say on the changes needed for CSP to become 'the' Counter-Strike of choice. 

davestr1zl:  I think theres is a very large number of things that need to change or be fixed, some are very minor some are quite major. One problem that has been discussed numerous times is of course the models which i think in themselves lead to numerous other issues that people wouldnt normally associate with them, such as recoil being easier (or perhaps different) to control, and weapons being more powerful than they normally would (such as glock burst fire for example) due to the fact that the target you're shooting it is like 30% larger and therefore easier to hit. Then there are a lot of minor issues that need tweaking such as certain walls being spammable that shouldn't be, slight map adjustements, directional sound being hard to hear aswell as the footsteps being far too quiet and indistinguishable from gunfire, the radar being too short-sighted, smoke-grenade behaviour being opposite to that of 1.6 and many more. 

For the game to be ready for serious competitive play in major tournaments for large sums of prize money, all of these things will need to be solved, so i think we're looking at well over a year for the game to become close to ready.

I think, however, it is an amazing start and is in great shape for an early BETA release in its current form, and the game could be ready for non-serious competitive play (ie. casual scrims and minor tournaments) as soon as the models are released in 1.05.

Although the CSP team is being tight lipped on the release date for 1.05, it's understood that they are attempting to fix all the issues raised from the BETA to make the game perfect and even more successful than January's launch which has all but died down.