Grégorio Machadinho started work for Ligarena, the ESWC organisers in September of 2000 as their Counterstrike tournament director. Since last year, he has also been in charge of the qualifying system. Today he agreed to sit down and talk with us about the ESWC CS girls tournament and the LOEW.


ESR: I notice that the Counterstrike main event has the same prize pool as last year - €100k, whilst the Counterstrike Female Masters Cup has increased from €7k to €20k. What was the reason for this decision?

Grégorio: Last year's tournament was a test, a first for cash prizes on a female tournament. This year we increase the number of team attending and we want to still increase the interest of the tournament. Increasing the cash prizes was a natural step for us.


ESR: Many of the CS Female teams never or rarely play against each other when something is at stake, how will you decide which teams merit an invitation and which do not?

Grégorio: Every team registered as candidate have to let us know their achievements and some words to explain us their motivation for attending the ESWC.

Grégorio: Beside this we will look at the more recent results for the team we don’t know: i.e. we will be very attentive to a tournament like LOEW. This kind of initiative is too rare to not be attentive to it. We will use the results of the tournament to help us to make our choice for the selection and especially define the seeding of our 2004 event. But if this event comes at the right time, this won’t be the single criteria to make our decision. We won’t penalize too much the team who can’t attend for personal or “ping” reason.


ESR: With 46 teams taking part in the main Counterstrike event, do you think that 2005 might see some female teams competing in the main event instead?

Grégorio: Since the beginning, the main event has been open to every kind of team: male, female or mixed. ESWC work with a qualifier system and according to the level of the countries, that’s could the Top 1 team, sometime the Top 2 or Top 3 who attend to our event. If a female team or a mixed team reach this level, we can imagine that 2005 the main event could see those teams competing. Despite everything, 2005 is maybe too soon again.


ESR: After three days of ESWC, I realised that something was missing from the atmosphere you normally find at the biggest events: the delightful odour of unwashed players. Asides from this benefit of the female tournament, what do you hope to achieve by running separate competitions?

Grégorio: Our goal is not organize separate competition in long term. By running this kind of competition we hope open more often the doors to the big events to the girl community, make the electronic sports more attractive with well organised event in addition of interesting cash prizes and try to motive them to play more and more in big competition and get at the end female team able to qualify and compete in the main event. That’s what we hope. Time will tell.


ESR: Thankyou for your time.

Grégorio: I want to thank the initiators of LOEW. I hope to see everybody as a player or spectator at the ESWC 2004!

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