The Swedes land a psychological blow to their Electronic Sports World Cup rivals by winning the KODE5 CM storm invitational and European Nation Championship (ENC) in the space of a few days.

fnatic comfortably beat the German TBH.eSports 2-0, setting up a single elimination final against KODE5 champions mTw.dk, which they went onto win 2-0: 21-18 on de_train and 16-8 on de_inferno.

fnatic were seeded second, below the Danes, for the Counter Strike 1.6 invitational tournament at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany. The victory comes only days before the ESWC grand finals start in San Jose, USA; also rectifying their KODE5 second place finish to the Danes, and assert themselves as the pre-tournament favourites over mTw, who're widely seen as the best team in the world right now.

fnatic's victory automatically qualifies the team for the KODE5 global finals next year, they also picked up a small amount of prize money as well.

The tournament was organised by the KODE5 organisation to provide a pure eSport element to the Games Convention, and was originally supposed to play host to the top three finishers from the global finals held three months ago in Moscow, Russia.
SK Gaming earlier confirmed they were unable to attend the event which meant fourth place finishers Meet Your Makers (MYM), the reigning ESWC champions, were drafted as the fourth team.

The Poles pulled out from the competition last week and were replaced by TBH.eSports. Jakub 'kuben' Gurczyński, a MYM player, explained the move on the teams website, “we're going directly going to San Jose because the flights from Germany are very expensive and it was pretty hard to find a good departure and arrival time from an airport near Leipzig”.

Three of the fnatic players, Patrik 'cArn' Sattermon (bottom right), Patrik 'f0rest' Lindberg (bottom left), Harley 'dsn' Orwall (top left), had won the ENC earlier in the week by beating the German national team in the final, winning €15,000 between the five players.

The event at the Games Convention had a number of high profile European players who're also set to compete in the ESWC finals, which begin on Monday. A win in both the team and national competition is likely to put the fnatic players in good spirit ahead of the biggest tournament of 2008.