Magnus “Fox” Olsson

WCG Seed : 8
Total Q4 Prize Money : $12,069
GGL Q4 World Ranking : 7
GGL 1v1 World Ranking : 9

Q4 Results to date :

2006 WSVG UK : 7th
2006 Intel Summer : 6th
2006 WSVG Dreamhack : 3rd
2006 ESWC Sweden : 4th
2005 Rendezvous : 1st
2005 CPL Winter : 3rd
2005 Dreamhack : 2nd

A last minute call up for the fox to attend WCG was greeted with glee from his many fans and rightly so, for this popular Swede remains one of the very best players in Quake 4 and I could think of no more ideal player to replace cooller at the tournament.

Despite his relatively low key appearances at tournaments in Quake 4, he has consistently achieved a top 8 finish in all of his tournaments. However he has yet to break into the winners circle (save for a Swedish lan win) and although he has a couple of podiums to his name, he is still not widely considered to be a top 3 player.

Having said all this, whenever he does lose in a tournament, it is never by many frags, in fact, he seems hell bent on losing close matches. Back when Quake 4 was just released, many (including me) has Fox on the radar as something very special indeed and when he finished 3rd at CPL Winter that seemed to be the case, but things have not gone so well since, especially when he cant even get into the country to play at Quakecon.

Late call ups to tournaments have been something of a phenomenon this year, with those called up players playing as if they have no care in the world and often taking major honours. In warcraft 3 at the EuroCup, Rotterdam was a late replacement and promptly beat Grubby twice to win the EuroCup title. At kode 5 finals, the little known k1ller was called up as a late replacement for the injured 2GD and he promptly ended up playing in the final (ok, so cooller got disqualified, but he would still have been third!). What this says is that you can never write off a late entrant to a tournament final, especially when one is as talented as Fox.

Perhaps this is the break he needed to get himself a tournament victory and he would be forgiven for thinking this was a way of paying him back after his problems getting to quakecon, what goes around, comes around.

Prediction : With the odds stacked against him in his group, its hard to see, on form alone how he could possibly get into the last 4, but that would be to forget about one of his greatest strengths : resilience.