eSports Round-Up Week 1 – Worlds Edition

Published: October 6, 2015 10:00 AM /

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League Worlds

Say hello to a new weekly article I'll be putting up bringing the latest news from all around eSports. Each wrap up will be comprised of two sections, Results and News. This week will be a little bit different as it's mostly going to be about the start of the League of Legends World Championships, which kicked off in France last Thursday. So let's begin the first eSports Round-Up for the week of September 28th.

Results

Ah its that time of year again, League of Legends World Championships have arrived. The best teams in the world come together to see who is truly the greatest team in the world. Day 1 started with a few unexpected victories, but most matches were fairly predictable. French fan favorite Fnatic started the tournament off with a win over China's Invictus gaming, defeating them with a low score of 8-1. Cloud 9 was up next against AHQ and to many people's surprise Cloud 9 ended up defeating the Taiwanese team AHQ 9-2. For those who don't remember, Cloud 9 was the North American team who had a horrendous regular season in the LCS. Meteos stepped down from the team and was replaced by Hai, who had recently retired. Yet through all the problems, they managed to salvage the season with a miracle run and get into the NALCS Regional Qualifiers and defeating Team Liquid, TIP, and Gravity, earning the 3rd seed for Worlds.  After that upset, we saw SKT, EDG, CLG, and the KOO Tigers all taking home expected victories to round out Day 1.

Day 2 was more of the same with the addition of Group D making their first appearance of the tournament. KT Rolster defeated North American TSM fairly easily, with TSM only managing 3 kills the entire game. Following that match was our first major upset of the tournament. EULCS 2nd seed Team Origen defeated one of the top Chinese teams LGD Gaming; it wasn't a blowout though, as the final score of the match was 16-10 in favor of Origen. SKT, EDG, CLG all won to achieve a 2-0 record as well as the Flash Wolves taking down KOO Tigers for their first victory.

Day 3 started with two legendary teams EDG and SKT battling it out to see who will maintain their perfect record, and in the end SKT came out on top to make a perfect 3-0 record and delivering EDG their first loss. LGD lost once again to go 0-2 with their last hopes lying on the 3rd Chinese team Invictus Gaming. Sadly those hopes were quickly dashed as Cloud 9 defeated Invictus, improving to a perfect 2-0 Record. Chinese fans had to suffer a day of defeat, as all 3 Chinese teams were defeated. H2K and Origin both picked up a victory over the Bangkok Titans and TSM respectively. Rounding out the day was AHQ versus Fnatic, which resulted in AHQ defeating the Number 1 EULCS team who as we know, went 18-0 in the Summer Split.

Day 4 ... the day Europe stood still. The first 3 matches went on normally; TSM picked up their first victory against LGD forcing them to a 0-3 record. Origin defeated KT Rolster improving to a perfect 3-0 record on the weekend and following was Invictus defeating AHQ, and then it began. The battle to see if EU is truly greater than NA; 2-0 Cloud 9 were set to battle Fnatic. Surely Cloud 9 won't be able to handle the powerhouse team of Fnatic and Europe would take home an easy victory, Nope. Fnatic was off to an early lead against Cloud 9, but the game went back and forth until a late game push and a champion called Darius came around to change all of that. Darius has been banned away from the players almost every game, but when he wasn't banned he was almost always picked by a team. Cloud 9 Top laner Balls would show everyone why that champion should remain banned away as he secured a massive Pentakill on Fnatic, which led to the game ending push and Cloud 9 taking home the W against Fnatic. Viewers and fans were stunned, and Cloud 9 were ecstatic as well as emotional during their post game interview. Cloud 9 ended Week 1 with a perfect 3-0 run. Group A ended the day as the KOO Tigers handed CLG their first loss in a brutal 21-3 victory, and Brazilian wildcard team Pain Gaming secured their first win against the Flash Wolves. The next stage of Groups will start this Thursday October 8th.

News

Normally I would have more results if more things actually happened, but this week and this month will mostly be League of Legends results. Smaller matches will be included in the news section so let's begin!

DOTA's ESL One New York wrapped up this weekend with Vega defeating Team Secret 2-1. Vega crushed Team Secret in game one only to be crushed themselves by Team Secret in game two. Game 3, though, went in favor of Vega who defeated Team Secret to win the ESL One New York finals.

In Hearthstone news, the players for the Heartstone Americas Championship were announced. Coreia, Hotform, JAB, MoleGel, Nias, Purple, Trump, and Vlsp will all be competing for a $250,000 prize pool with the top 4 also qualifying for Blizzcon. This tournament will take place this weekend October 10th through the 11th, which leads up to Blizzcon in November.

Last week, Activision announced the Call of Duty World League. The World league will be a more official league similar to that of LCS and others. The league is split into Pro and Challenger divisions. This is good for the evolution of COD as an eSport; it can finally go beyond just the MLG events and into something a little more official with competition from around the world. I'm not the biggest Call of Duty fan, but I will be very interested to see how this goes. The Pro Division season starts this January in North America, Europe, Austrlia and New Zealand. You can read the full post from Activison here.

Finally, we have some very interesting news to bring. Earlier it was announced that an eSports player Union has been formed. This lengthy announcement was sent to all major tournament organizers, such as MLG, CEVO, ESL, etc, and it has some interesting points. In it, it says that travel support should be provided for players and that minimum prize money for CSGO should be $75,000 excluding travel .,and DOTA should have a minimum of $100,000 excluding travel. Interesting to note that among the many games this union wants to support, League of Legends is not one of them. My best guess is because teams that compete in games like CSGO or DOTA aren't restricted to one league and teams compete in many various tournaments and leagues while Pro League of Legends teams only compete in their respective leagues, such the LCS or China's LPL, which in theory makes sense. The full report and demands can be read here.

And with that, we have wrapped up most of the major news this week had to offer. Now I plan to have these articles go up each Sunday, but with Worlds usually ending their week on a Sunday, it makes things a little tougher to get out on time. Again I do apologize for the first week being mostly League of Legends coverage. I'll be back here next week to bring the latest from all around the eSports scene.

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