So I'm covering for our Content Manager at epic21 who was unable to make it, so here's how day 1 went but this time from a behind-the-scenes perspective. 

We started the morning on the back foot after a very long setup day on Wednesday for the team, the heat, combined with having to bring 170 tables up to the 1st floor, left a very tired staff team by Thursday morning. We also had a number of power issues following on from the installation of a new power system in to the venue that took all morning to resolve, obviously lack of power then has a knock on effect to the rest of the setup plans. There was a bit of fun to discover one of our main uplinks running through the building had been used for something else since our last event, but we quickly worked out what had happened and moved on. 

We got the bulk of setup done though and doors opened at 4pm ready for 450 people kick off a long weekend of gaming. The finer tweaks then continued through to the Opening Ceremony hosted by JoeShow (the Big Dill himself) and DaveMarr, with me making my usual appearance. 

It's important to me to be a part of kicking off the event and taking the time out to thank everyone that makes our events happen, we have 42 people here voluntarily giving up their time to put on a good show purely because they love gaming, as always, do show your appreciation (in the form of a drink usually goes down well!). We also have a great set of sponsors for epic21, including BlinkPredict, Noctua, ASTRO Gaming, OverclockersUK, bequiet!

I had the idea of going back to something oldschool for the opening ceremony, as part of the increase in social activities and fun tournaments at this event, inspired by our old friends at KustomPCs we had some oldschool Dolphin Olympics, a game I've personally lost hours to in the past and had some pretty big arguments over (I'm sure I stopped speaking to Squirrel for a few hours after losing to a multi-million point score). Chungus and PhilPhil (I dont think that was his actual name, but it stuck) took on the challenge with Chungus getting humiliated by trying to drive his dolphin with a Reech tribute mask and a few beers in hand. PhilPhil took the victory and our amazing cuddly toy prize! 

While all that was going on, the esports team were beavering away getting teams signed up ready to seed and populate the tournament schedule, giving us the following team numbers:

• CSGO - 27 Teams
• Dota2 - 8 Teams
• Overwatch - 4 Teams (come on UK Overwatch, you can do better!)
• Starcraft 2 - 24 Players
• Hearthstone - 10 Players

You can follow all the latest tournament results over on our tournament site.

So day 1 complete, quick sleep for the staff team before kicking off our busiest LAN day with all the tournaments starting, pub quiz, fun tournaments, big games and everything else that you've come to enjoy from all of us here at epic.LAN.