Germany is at it again! After a less than stellar presentation during the WCG Grand Final in Seattle, Alternate’s CS-Team is now getting a new chance to shine here at CeBIT and maybe win another international eSport-Event. The first opponent on the long road to victory will be Intoxicated from Latvia. An easy task?

Team Alternate is exuding an air of calm, going into their first match full of confidence. Without a doubt this team has accepted offline matches as their daily routine: swiftly USB sticks are plugged in, config files loaded, settings adjusted, voice servers initialized and TFTs set to personal preferences. But these screens are a constant reason for debate and conflict amongst gamers and organizers. The "not-quite-perfect" reaction-times on the flat panel displays and minor signs of "ghosting" are too much of an annoyance for some players to accept. Jan “mooN” Stolle for example insists on launching his CS in window-mode, in order to make full use of the screens native refresh-speed. David "CHEF-KOCH" Nagel on the other hand isn’t in any positon to complain, as he’s acting as a reporter, documenting the atmosphere around his team with a camera.

For now, time isn’t really of the essence for the team, as complications in the Local Area Network have postponed the first matches slightly. Team Alternate actually took the time for another small internal chat, during which Benjamin “paN” Mulert couldn’t surpress a hearty laugh after seeing the wooden mouse-pad of a Swiss player. After finishing their talks, team-captain mooN handed out some glucose-tablets to his teammates. Team Alternate isn’t preparing on a solely tactical-level, even if they hadn’t heard too much about the team from Latvia before.

But in the end it didn’t come as any surprise that Germany’s CS representatives won the match 16:03. But from an outsider’s point of view the match was still very interesting, because as calm as the team was in advance, it was equally professional during the encounter, short comments like “Don’t say anything!” coming from mooN restricted his teammates to communicating solely via text-chat. The only exceptions being important moves from the Latvians as well as changes in the own play-style. Newcomer Roman "Roman R." Rheinhard turned out to be a very valuable asset to the team, while he didn’t deliver the more decisive frags during the match; his comments and announcement greatly helped the team maintain a complete overview of the rounds played. His integration into the team seems to have progressed much better than recent results would let you assume. So Team Alternate swiftly took an obvious lead, not being able to avoid a few condescending jokes here and there, as is commonplace with the team from Linden.

The discipline with which the newly assigned team handled the match was extremely apparent and a noteworthy improvement over last year’s attempts in Seattle, even if Intoxicated didn’t push the German team to their limit. If Team Alternate can keep up today’s efforts unchanged, a German medal in CS could very well turn out to become a reality.