Angel: Frank Nuccio is a very good friend of mine, and he's a hard guy to dislike, unless you piss him off on cal [laughs] He'll go nuts real fast, his fuse is probably made of ice, ya know, because it just evaporates quickly, he's just a great person. The CS community really owes him a debt of gratitude with what he's able to do, started coming to our events and sneaking his way in, I mean, this is a time when noone was doing competitions for CS, and he comes in and invades our BYOC. We're all scratching our heads, and I remember the first thing I said to him, "That will never be used at the CPL, it's one of the poorest games I've ever seen", and he just didn't know how to take no for an answer, that kid just kept on coming back and back, and the groups got larger and larger, and so I said "let's make a little tournament for him", and then we have this whole showing.

I think the first tournament was $15,000, and then Razor didn't pay the prizes and I ended up paying two-thirds of the prizes and they agreed to pay one-third or bankrupt the company. Long story short, even at that point, that's what was the convincing factor, because I never got one complaint about that. All the people who were not part of it complained, but to them they were just happy they got that opportunity. You know, there's something special about this community, because if it was Quake 3 they would have annihilated us. Well that's when i decided that we were going to move forward, and that's when he became commissioner of the league.

His Father died about 10 years ago I think, and he reluctantly became sort of involved with his family business, the second oldest pizza place in Dallas, called Marko's Pizza. Marko's has been around since 1950-something here in Dallas; long story short, him and I sat down and he, well, he didn't ask for advice, he just presents the problem, and he says "I'm thinking of ways to increase the business", and I say you need re-decorate, and you need to do something no one in Dallas is doing. Introduce a whole-wheat, low-carb pizza, and I said I'll even research it and come up with the recipe for you. And I did it, and it's called the Don Luis pizza, and Luis is my middle name so he named it after me, so I've basically sealed my fate, because he's now up over 300% in revenue and now it's become a full-time job for him.

And Frank is a guy who just can't stand still, he's always active, you never know if you have his attention, he's always like looking around. But now he has that occupational therapy, and that's really the best for him. I think Frank will probably find a way to return next year or something, as his heart really is in the CPL.

Angel: Basically, the thing that bothers me the most right now about Counter-Strike is Steam. I think Steam is a good idea, but a bad implementation. First of all, we are in an expensive five-star hotel, and a T1 costs two thousand dollars a day. So, for valve to force me and my business to activate so much bandwidth to touch that server and have every computer authenticate is really putting a lot of pressure on us, and it also opens a lot of risk in our tournament in that process. We've talked to them and they seem reluctant to understand that and ideal solution, a compromise, would be that their servers are capable of saying "ok, cpl has at the gaylord texan resort this IP range, so anyone that touches the server from this ip range authenticates once and that's it", but to me to ask your clients to constantly say "I'm ok, I didn't steal from you", you know, it's like, having to show your credit card whenever you come into a store, you know I just don't like that, it's making lan centers unhappy and community members unhappy.

I understand the business model behind it, but it's really not working. So to answer your question, the one thing I'd like to see changed in CS is Steam. Things that need to be addressed are a lot more in CS, but if we put them on a list, Steam would be the top of the list. I understand the ideas, they're bypassing a lot of middle-men in the process, but they're making a lot of people suffer who are investing, in our case, millions of dollars to promote their game. And it's not like we have a cut or a percentage of games sold that goes to us, there's no such relationship between us, so I would say that's number one.

Angel: The first day of the event we were basically inundated with a tremendous amount of events, power problems, internet problems, but we also miscalculated one aspect, that the band that was playing for the concert needed to set-up the day before. We figured we could do the CAL finals onstage, but we couldn't because there was a grand piano [laughter] and such onstage.

We did the best we could with all the problems, it's unfortunate it happened this way, the media didn't have connectivity, and I'm making no excuses, we did not give those finals the attention they deserved. That being said, it will never happen again. We want to continue this method of bringing the invite finalists to the CPL this Winter, and we promise a better job at following through with the hype next time.

Angel: That's not my decision to make, that's Tom Gardner's, and I know the sponsors liked it and liked the whole concept, and there's a lot of changes coming from CAL. I'm telling this to CS-Nation because you guys have so much clout and a lot of your visitors are CAL participants, days are short of a free CAL. I mean, we are going to start charging for CAL, it's going to be a minimum amount of money, but that way we can re-invest it to major things. The gamers want all it invested into prizes. That's not fair. There are expenses to run CAL, and it's not fair to those admins who are working for free. Even if it's just a token, even if it's just a little bit for CAL to be self-sufficient, to pay the admins who are working there, I know that they'd be happy if we told them "Hey, you get a couple hundred dollars for working there" — you know, it's better than nothing.

So, when we're going to implement that we're not absolutely sure yet, it'll be very minimum, $5 a season or something like that, it's not going to be something where we just take advantage of them or something, but we want to capitalize cal so we can run better and bigger events, and that's what's going to happen. The decisions about where we hold the finals, there's a very able staff that's capable of making those decisions. It seems the community embraced it at the end, it changes the dynamics about invite, and I think it worked out well.

Angel: I don't know about responsible, maybe we haven't done as good a job at setting the expectation that "Go Pro" is a big thing for us. I will take responsibility that we threw it at invite without preparation, I mean this is something we probably should have announced a year before, like "Hey guys, get ready", so there was a shake-up, an obvious shake-up, but you know, it's the same thing with any sport. You have a break, take advantage of your break, go out and do some real-life stuff, come back to CAL, be ready, because there's a second season. That's basically my answer to that. Yes, I take responsibility in the fact that we mismanaged that, it was something that I really wanted to do and I went to Frank and Frank said "Wow, this is cool", but I probably should have listened to Frank as he said "We should probably do this a little slower", and I'm all about "let's get it out of the way, let's get it done", and there will be shake-ups, but at the end of the day I think it did work out.

Yeah, we put a lot of pressure on them, yeah we want them to go pro, when I hear about someone practicing 11 or 12 hours a day, yeah that doesn't make me happy, but if they're playing a few hours every day and practicing on CAL, yeah that's about right, but go out and have a break, ride a bicycle or visit with friends like this, this is a real moment right here. We're both alive, we're both talking, this is real, and when you're on a computer that's almost like a transition of reality rather than reality itself.

Angel: Yes, that's going to happen, I know a lot of organizations like ESL are quickly expanding through Europe, expecting that we're going to rain on their parade, and ESL has a different format than we do so we don't see them as a competitor, actually the owner of SEL is a partner of the CPL, he's actually a tour partner for the CPL World Tour in Sweden, so yes the plan is to continue with that. We've been planning this a long time, and we want to get our operation up to par, and now that we're focusing on the tour that's global, we can pair them close together.

The biggest battle we have with CAL is integrating both sides, it's amazing the arguments that take place, you know, [laughs], CPL|George telling CAL admins "I'm CPL George, I have authority over you!" [all laugh], but you know how we solved that? We have an irc channel for both CAL admins and CPL, and if we have fights we have them in there, and all of a sudden we find out that we're so integrated because CAL runs CPL tournaments. We're the same thing, just different ways of viewing it.

Angel: Because an amateur league should not dictate what a professional league does. However, we're revisiting that policy, it's the opinion of the CAL staff that if we get stricter on it that we may curb a lot of those problems. Let's just say that I'm in a state of ambivalence about that, it being an amateur league, I mean before there were admins thinking "we made cpl", and some of us are saying [laughs] "we made you, we put our name on it and you get 300,000 players", so yeah we're working together on this and I think we're coming on a better solution. Let's just say that policy is under review right now.

Angel: Valve doesn't give us a lot of choices on what we can use, because if we have to authenticate through Steam we have to use source.

Angel: Yeah, I know they say that, but I know they'll phase it out because they don't want two games out there, they've told us that. As with CS, everytime there's a change there's controvery, so we're going to sit this one through and see what is right and wrong.

Angel: You know I don't know these guys, they're not a part of our community, I've been with this community a long time, I think GotFrag made a mistake by associating themselves with an organization not proven, I warned GotFrag at the summer event, I said "I was an investment banker, I spent my life looking at other businesses and analyzing, and that was the same event we threw Recon out because he was offering teams money to walk out of our event, and things we've never mentioned before because it was never proper, that's not the way we run our organization.

But I did tell people "be careful", they're announcing x-amounts of dollars and they don't have sponsors then suddenly they show up, and I was just like "Where is this money coming from?" They made a lot of accusation, they threatened to sue us because they're convinced we were behind their collapse and we architected this whole thing.

Angel: [much laughter] Yeah, exactly, SPL, we're changing our name [more laughter]. Was I happy when they collapsed that way? Absolutely not. You know what that did? It's going to stifle eSports progress, even WCG isn't getting as much hype as last year. When the tide rises, all ships need to rise, and when one sinks it affects us all. You know, WCG, we even offered to host their qualifier here at this CPL for free to advance eSports, but they didn't want anything to do with us. I was surprised how cavalier CXG was about it, and how they lied, telling people they'd get their checks and all that, but otherwise they were ill-prepared for the tournament. We felt obligated to make this tournament better than ever. What we have this summer is what they should have had. I'm going to be quoted a hundred times - CPL Extreme Championships is what CXG should have been.

Angel: We have all our partners here today who are hosting the stops, and a lot of them in addition to the 1v1 game want to host a CS tournament. If just 5 of our partners in addition to the CPL held CS tournaments, We may have 7 tournaments next year! The World Tour is a good way to get our foot in the door with the media, and no CS is not going away. Consider it more of another branch than another direction.