Last weekend, the World Championship Qualifier: European Championship 2010 took place. I was part of the live coverage team and tried to give you a good impression of what was happening on site. The last time I did an English coverage was roughly 2 years ago, it was the first time we worked with this team (PJ Tierney was the other writer) and everything went live on a brand new site. Still, we overcame the odds and were able to produce a good result; the website even crashed temporarily under the load.

In the end, it was Rodrigo Togores Moli who overcame more than 180 other players to win the title of European Champion 2010! He piloted the notorious Frog OTK deck, feared by a lot of Duelists, but often considered not consistent enough to win a larger tournament. Rodrigo proved the competition wrong, mastering it and taking it to a superior finish!

While the tournament couldn’t have been run much more successful from an organizational point of view, I was not entirely satisfied with my own performance. It was a little frustrating having to go over articles several times with the language barrier causing me slight problems. Even though my English is certainly not bad, it takes a lot more time to polish up an English article than a German article. The coverage system also took some getting used to and further slowed me down. I’m positive that we’ll find some ways to master these challenges in the future so my “articles per round” ratio will go up again.

Speaking of the future, the next big European Yu-Gi-Oh! event will be the first stop of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series outside of North America. It’s rather likely that I’ll be a part of the coverage team there as well and keep you guys up to date. Alright, that’s pretty much it for the moment. Just one more thing: As our editor on site had to face the same problem I did with English “only” being his second language, there might be some awkward phrases, typos or spelling mistakes in the coverage. It would be nice if you could point these out to me so I can improve and produce even better results in the future! You can find the live coverage here.