Last week saw the East and West coast conference finals of the US based CPM TDM tournament, WANsanity. Team Abuse took down European Promode Pinup clan Nobles in straight sets. They demonstrated their trademark teamplay in combination with no lack of aim in spite of heightened pings. Demos of those games are available on CH-TV (cpm21, cpm18i, cpm4). Later the same night, Alliance of Pain surprised many in the CPM community when they defeated the team that many had heavily backed to win the tournament: The Stickmen . AoP proved what the WANsanity statistics had already suggested: their aim is truely incredible! The three games were a great demonstration of individual skills backing an aggresive team style. Check the demos of cpm21, cpm18i and cpm4.

On Saturday at 4pm EDT (22 CET), the two conference winners will face up to determine the Grand Champion of this first WANsanity tournament! You can check out the action on GTV and with TSN live shoutcast. This isn't the first time these two clans have met in competition: they were the finalists in the previous US CPM TDM tournament, Q3Alliance. Last time, Abuse walked away without breaking a sweat, but this time things are likely to be very different. One major difference is that the winner gets their pick of the prizes: with 4 Intel P4 Processors (with Hyperthreading technology I hear :o) or 4 ATi Radeon 9800 Pro cards. The losing team gets whatever the winning team leaves behind, which is nothing to be sniffed at. Both teams will also receive a dedicated Speakeasy Server port for a year!

I managed to get a few brief words with two of the guys behind these top CPM clans: a|citizen and yrim of AoP. Read on...