It's interesting to see SK attending even smaller LAN events like these. But of course, back at that time it wasnt very small. Nowdays the top teams only attend the tier1 events. They dont even bother going to LANs even though they are very welcome to do so. I remember reading there was a lot of controversy around SK attending these kind of LANs. Lower tier teams had no chance at all and were mad because they felt like SK and themselves were playing in completely different "leagues" and said that SK should have stuck to playing the bigger international events. But for SK, this was another win in the bag and 3 grand in prize winnings. Back when there were only like 3 big events every year, the teams really took hold of every moment to compete offline.
I'm not sure what their contracts would have been like circa 2003 but suffice to say that they were either living together or living at home still. Anything with a sizeable prize pool would have been fair game for them. This is also at the time when outside of CPL/ESWC/WCG, this would have been one of the bigger tournaments. Let's also not sleep on Dopefish which was also a really good team and had some stars in players like Crypt, searcher and hyber.
