epic.FIVE is well under way now, and the tournaments are progressing well. We're running a number of tournaments this event, with our two £1,000 prize-winning tournaments being joined by our fun tournaments for UT 2004, Mario Kart Wii, TrackMania Nations and a TM Nations track building contest.

TrackMania Nations

Playing for a chance to win a Tt eSPORTS CHALLENGER Gaming Keyboard, the finalists after 3 elimination rounds are:

• Nanaki
• _Jay_
• BA_RedPlague
• th0rn0
• Kayomani
• Elsie
• matthab
• strider_white
• Kaneth

They'll be playing at 14:30 today and you can follow the results here and on Twitter @epiclan.

£1,000 Counter-Strike: Source

Some close matches in the group stages have led us into what is going to be a great double elimination stage. You can follow the results and progress as it happens on our tournament site. There's also some excellent coverage of the CSS from some of our coverage partners and teams:

• Cadred
  
• gamer.fm
• The Last Resort

The matches begin at 11AM and we'll be running Source TV for some of them, details will be available on the epic.LAN tournaments site along with real-time results.

£1,000 Team Fortress 2 Tournament

A great day of matches ended with the top seeds performing as expected, going through to the elimination stages in prime position to fight for the top prize! Again, all details can be found on our tournament website. You can follow coverage on:

• TF2TV
• vanillatf2

Matches also begin at 11AM and TF2TV will be casting matches as well - Saxton Hale would be proud. You can follow all the details on epic.Tournaments.

Mario Kart Wii

Kicking off today is our fun Mario Kart Wii tournament. A head to head format will see one person crowned King of the Mushroom Circuit. Expect thrills, spills, crashes and Birdo to unexpectedly win every race. You can also follow this on epic.Tournaments! Matches begin at 11AM.

Some of you will soon be packing up for epic.FIVE (the staff have already started!) and as many of our past participants will testify, it's a pain when you turn up to an event and you've either forgotten a major part of your PC setup, like your mouse, or even left all of your clothes behind!

So, being kind, helpful types here at epic.LAN, we've put together some advice and a checklist of things you need, to make sure you don't forget anything for the event and also on how to Survive the LAN Party when you have arrived for those new to LAN gaming events.

Read More

We've been reviewing games for the past few events as well as looking at your comments on the forums and we've now made our epic.FIVE timetable available for you.

We have increased the number of things going on, added some recent hits but kept in the old favourites that people still enjoy.

You'll find the Steam or download links for most of the games in the timetable to allow you to download them before the event if you wish to take part.

We would ask that you try to get any downloads and patches sorted before the event in order to conserve bandwidth.

Custom PC, the UK's essential read for PC hardware, games and for PC modding enthusiasts, will be sending us 100 copies of their latest magazine for you to enjoy at your leisure at epic.FIVE!

The magazines will be placed all over the event, in both Halls 1 and 2, allowing you all to catch up on the latest news and reviews in between your gaming.

About Custom PC

Custom PC is the magazine for people who are passionate about PC technology and hardware.Whether you've been building and customising PCs for years or you've just started performance-tuning ready-made systems, all the information you need is now in one place.

Custom PC isn't just another PC mag - it's the ONLY magazine with enough space to devote whole pages to single product reviews. And we're not talking boring printers and hum-drum peripherals, but the best performing components - whatever your budget.

It's a LAN, you aren't supposed to sleep, but if you must then we have a number of sleeping options available.

• Camping - Our recommended option. If you want a quiet night away from any noise then we have masses of free camping space available for you in the centre-course area.
• Indoor Sleeping Rooms - We have two indoor sleeping rooms available for this event, and one has been designated as 'non-snoring'. Please do bear in mind that these are communal sleeping areas and therefore there will be some noise of people coming and going in the night. Indoor sleeping room space is limited, there is no guarantee of enough space indoors for every participant. Please help by only using a single airbed.
  
• Off-Site Hotels and B&Bs - Spend your weekend in luxury in one of the town's large number of accomodation options, some of which have been listed on our Sleeping Page. 
• Gaming Halls - We don't mind you getting some sleep in the spare space in the gaming halls, however this needs to be in a position where you do not block the rows or any emergency exists. We will ask people to move if you are causing a fire hazard, so make sure you find a corner out of the way. 

You can view the location of these various sleeping spaces on our handy Google Map (note that you will need to use a browser capable of showing Google Maps layers).

If you wanted to attend epic.FIVE, but missed out, you're in luck! Due to a small number of cancellations, we can offer a few seats to any eager gamers wanting to be a part of our biggest event yet.

To grab one of our cancellation places simply contact us by email, or in Quakenet IRC #epic.LAN. Unfortunately it is very unlikely at this stage that we can make any seating rearrangements for any cancellation spaces as most clans/groups are now sat together, unless anybody is willing to move around for you, so it's pretty much a pick of the seats available on the seating plan as it stands now.

Note that if there is a big rush for these spaces, then priority will go to those on the waiting list, i.e. people who had signed up to the event but had not paid when the event sold out.

This tournament went down a treat at epic.FOUR so it will be returning for epic.FIVE

The tournament format is quite simple. We fill a server with people who want to play on a first-come-first-served basis and kick off a deathmatch map with a time limit of 5mins and a frag limit of 100. As soon as either of those limits are reached we kick-ban the bottom few players and move onto the next map until we're left with an epic final and a load of sore wrists!

It will be a solo tournament, so you don't need to worry about finding teams, just sign up at the event to take part! You do not have to be sat in a specific area to participate in this fun tournament.

Lets see if Vardy can hold onto his title!

At our last event, we tried out a new catering service which was met with lots of approval from the participants, in fact people wanted more of them!

So we've been back to the guys from the catering company last time and asked them back again, but this time instead of just being open for breakfast, they're going to be open for main meals throughout the day so you don't even have to leave the site for your nom nom fix.

They'll even be open when you arrive on the Thursday so you can refuel after your long journey! And there will also be a Curry Night on the Friday from 7pm - 10pm.

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We are extremely pleased to announce that epic.FIVE has now sold out with 200 participants attending our UK LAN event taking place in just over 2 weeks.

The whole team is really looking forward to delivering our biggest LAN yet and making sure that we do everything we can to make it our best event to date, whether you are attending as a casual gamer or participating in either the TF2 or CSS tournaments.

We've had a few questions about why there are still spaces on the plan and what to do if you still want a space, so here's a quick FAQ...

Cancellation Spaces

As the event has now reached capacity, we will be able to process cancellation spaces subject to reselling your place and an administation fee as detailed in our cancellation policy. If you find that you are now unable to attend, please let us know and we will work through any cancellation requests in the order that they are received. Remember that your ticket is not transferrable.

Will you be opening up the other rows?

In summary, nope. We said that we're going to do a 200 person event this time, and that's roughly what we plan to do. We want to get this event right and then add to the capacity in the future and grow sensibly, we've seen far too many events try unrealistic leaps in numbers and then fail, we dont want to fall into that trap. 

But part of my clan/group has paid and one or two missed out!

OK, we're not entirely unreasonable and we want to try to help these cases within the seating we have available already. If your clan is partly paid and there are just a couple of people who missed out then you need to contact us with their username and we will give you the details to make a manual PayPal or Bank Transfer payment. It may be that these spaces come from cancellations or from the small number of open spaces on the plan already.We need to finalise the seating plan and tournaments as soon as possible though, so please contact us as quickly as you can to make these arrangements.

My entire clan wishes to attend, but we didn't book in time.

We're sorry, but in this case we won't be able to fit in entire new bookings unless there are some large groups of cancellations. But make sure you put epic.SIX into your diary, bookings will open during the next event.

The first of our fun tournaments for epic.FIVE. The premise is simple, create a Trackmanina Nations Forever map following the theme we give you at the start of the event which will include some compulsory elements. For those of you new to the game, Trackmania Nations is the free-to-play version.

The best maps created will then be played as part of the big game of Trackmania during the event with voting on the website for the ultimate winner.

Please download the game before you get to epic.FIVE or download it from the Steam content cache on our event ftp to save bandwidth.