Introduction

The FiringSquad Editors Challenge sponsored by the Intel® Core™2 Extreme processor has hit an incredible high with Round 2. The entries were so competitive that the top 20 all received votes from our judges, and four of the ones who passed through to the next round didn’t even get votes from at least one judge! That is how close the competition was.

Jakub: Speaking for myself on my choices, I focused on submissions that demonstrated a great deal of work, where the writer showed he was capable of criticism, and for interesting subject matter – in that order. Writing professionally, even as an occasional freelancer, is a great deal more work than most people give it credit for. Thus, in this round and succeeding rounds I expect those exact qualities to shine through in articles. Regardless, it was very difficult picking the finalists and almost all the entries here were of the highest quality. Many professional sites, FiringSquad included, would be proud to have articles as insightful and interesting as these posted professionally. Even if you did not advance to the next round, be proud of yourselves. Thank you to everyone who participated.

JCal: All I have to say is WOW!. Quite frankly when reading the entries in the first two preliminary rounds for this contest I figured it would be very easy to pick the to 10 entries for the second round. I couldn't have been more wrong. Nearly everyone who made it to this second round turned up their writing volume to "11" and in short made the selection process extremely tough. We had some very hard decisions to make but in the end the 10 people who are moving onto the next round in the FiringSquad Editors Challenge wrote some excellent entries and all of them would be great articles for FiringSquad. That means that the next round is going to be even tougher to judge as all of us on the staff combined with the votes by our readers will have to tell some very talented authors that they won't be moving onto the final round. Congrats to all of the 10 authors and good luck going into the next round.

Brandon: Not sure I have anything different to say than what JCal has already said. This was definitely the hardest round to judge because all the submissions were good; for subsequent rounds the entrants will definitely have to pick up their game to make it to the finals. To address one of the main concerns that have been raised, the downvoting, while unfortunate, in the end balances out in my opinion, especially when you factor in the judges scores. Good luck to the final 10, and to those who didn't make it, thank you for participating, hopefully we can continue to do this again in the near future.

Round 2 Graduates
CanadaDave	Your Hard Drive's Kung Fu is Weak	587
darrellwu	The Greatest Game You've Never Played	465
kevinSpiess	3rd Party Optimized ATI Driver Roundup	434
jacobvandy	Windows Vista: The Future of PC Gaming	427
OldFriend	Project Gotham Racing 3 Enlivened	420
Droniac	Playing your G5 to the Max!	358
Power666	Wii Remote: the PC Revolution?	347
OgreFade	Optimizing Supreme Commander	345
BucNews	Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar	340
DaugWok	The War Widens: Supreme Commander Dual Display	326
*article names not exactly typed out

Best of luck to everyone in the next round! The competition is remarkably close. Quite honestly I doubt any of us expected things to be so tight this round yet here we are. If you find yourself at the lower end of the bracket be sure in knowing you can jump up with a hit article. Go for the home run!