Thursday, September 13th, 2007

The year 2006 has finally come to a close. I have to say it was a great year for me personally, and X3O as a whole. We are now the only gaming center (PC/Console LAN) in the Rockville, MD area; and are quickly becoming the premiere gaming venue of choice on the east coast. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the past year.

In 2006, X3O Gaming Center held 10 tournaments for a variety of games from Counter-Strike 1.6 to Madden NFL 06. We also hosted 5 over-night lockINs and a ton of new game premieres. X3O had its 1 year anniversary, and just this past December, officially re-opened our Professional Gaming divisions.

Competitive gaming as a whole has grown a lot in the tri-state area. With the emergence of new event organizers and tournament directors, we have quickly become one of the hot-spots for gaming here in the United Sates. Part of this is due to the efforts of Jesse “wb” Dedmon (DC-LAN) and Steve "Ryu" Rattacasa (RYU LAN) who have both taken it upon themselves to host 100+ LAN events in MD/VA. Unknown to a lot of FPS gamers, the fighting game community (Street Fighter 3rd Strike, MVC2, T5, etc) is also very strong in Virginia, with monthly tournaments and the support of MAGFest, a gaming and music festival.

As a lot of you may know Team x3o attended the Lethal Gamers Winter 06 Boot Camp and Tournament this past week. I personally did not attend the event with them, however am here now at CPL. Though their performance was not amazing, I was definitely satisfied and feel that the event was worth it as a whole. As you can see on our event information page here, they got a lot of scrims in against some of the better known teams, which is really what they went down for. They ended up placing 5th at the LG tournament, beating high quality teams like M19 and ATHF (Pug), however ending up loosing to Hoorai. For teams that are looking for a good chance to warm up and prepare for the CPL, there is no better place then the LG Boot Camp.