There used to be a time when I thought that I was good at “Team Fortress 2.” Those days are long past, and now I sit at home nursing my still-bruised ego. You see, I just made the mistake of competing against people better than me. It’s a mistake I’ll never make again.

The venue was the European “Team Fortress 2” League’s Community Highlander Tournament—Highlander meaning “there can be only one” of each class. The tournament was open to anybody who could scrounge together eight friends who were willing to play the other eight classes. My friend, a junior from Berkeley, was looking for somebody to play demo, and since it was my second-most-played class, I offered my services.

Competitive “Team Fortress 2” is an altogether different beast from the game that’s played on your average public server. In most servers, there are 12 players on each team, with no limits on classes, meaning most teams usually end up with two medics and two soldiers. In a Highlander match, each class suddenly becomes that much more valuable. For obvious reasons, the medic becomes the highest-priority target, but taking out the demo or soldier can instantly put an end to an offensive push.

Then there’s the case of the winning. It sounds like an obvious thing, but in the endless loops of pub matches, players rarely bother to push themselves until the final few minutes of the match. But in competitive “TF2,” time is always ticking. For attack/defend and payload maps, the first attacking team captures as many points as they can until time runs out. The teams then switch sides, and the defending team must capture as many points in a shorter amount of time. It’s pretty much college football overtime on a timer, and I think we can all agree how awesome that is.

Looking back, it’s too bad that we didn’t know any of those things until we started our first match. As such, it should come as no surprise that my team didn’t practice at all in the weeks leading up to our first match. With our team spread across Georgia, Missouri and California, among other places, getting all nine players to play “Team Fortress 2” at the same time wasn’t exactly easy. Even when we did get together, there was no easy way to actually practice—we couldn’t play five on four, and if we joined a public server, there was no way to guarantee that we’d be on the same team.

So we didn’t really practice at all. There was no magical montage of my team and me pulling off airshot after airshot set to the “Top Gun” theme. We were on the highway to the danger zone, but even then I guess none of us cared quite enough to practice. Flying by the seat of our pants, we were getting closer and closer to our first match against a team named HiSpy.

We were unprepared and uncoordinated, but were our skillz mad enough to take on the likes of HiSpy? Stay tuned for the next part in my saga of competitive TF2.