We recently ran a huge LAN tournament in my area for Counterstrike, UT: 2004, and Halo 2. We got sponsorships from ATI, Maxtor, and Bawls and they sent us some really nice prizes. T-shirts and PC cooling system from ATI, a 200 gb external hard drive from Maxtor, and a few cases of Bawls. Around 100 people showed up and we played games all night. We had a really great time and now we're planning to set up another one in the future.

Has anyone here ever participated in or hosted a LAN party or tournament?

We had Counter-Strike LAN parties in high school during study halls that had between 40-50 people. It was pretty kickass.

There is actually a place locally where you can host your own LAN parties, it's open 24-hours (for those night-owl dorks :p )...they also have bowling, laser tag, and other sweet games.

If you wanna see some pics from our mega lan you can check them out here (the site was down for quite awhile and now we finally got it back up).

You can see me playing PC in one of the pics, and then my team around our tv for the xbox tourney. I'm wearing a Governator t-shirt :p .

http://nolaglan.cjb.net/gallery