Esports

Team Secret Celebrates DOTA 2 Win By Cutting Two Players, Bringing Back Arteezy

Remember two weeks ago, when Team Secret showed they didn’t need a lineup of marquee superstars like Artour “Arteezy” Babaev to be the best team in DOTA 2? Well, apparently they’re over that now. Instead, they have decided they need marquee superstars exactly like Arteezy… and his fellow Evil Geniuses teammate Saahil “UNiVeRsE” Arora. Who…

The grand finals of the 2016 Halo World Championship between teams CLG and Allegiance kick off at 7 PM Eastern. One team will win $1 million. The other team only wins $500,000. The tension should be mildly palpable. Watch it live over on Twitch.

Korea Just Found A New Game To Dominate: Dota 2

Time to pack it in, Western Dota 2 teams: Korea just won a premier title by sweeping the reigning International champions, Evil Geniuses, in a lopsided final to conclude the Dota Pit League playoffs. It’s hard to believe that it was only last summer that we all enjoyed the heartwarming success of MVP Phoenix, the…

Women’s Counter-Strike Is Ready For A Breakthrough

While the explosive growth in popularity for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has mostly made the Fnatics and the Na’Vis of the world into esports stars, the women’s competitive scene has often been an overlooked cornerstone of the game. That’s finally starting to change as some of esports’ biggest sponsors and organizations have started to give them…

Shaq And A-Rod Bought Into A League Of Legends Team

Apparently unwilling to let Rick Fox have League of Legends all to himself, Shaquille O’Neal and the Yankees’ A-Rod just announced that they are getting into the esports business by investing in the squarely middle-of-the-road LoL and Counter-Strike organization NRG. In a statement to The Daily Dot, NRG chairman Andy Miller said that Shaq “has…

15 Year-Old Prodigy Wins Hearthstone Americas Winter Championship

William “Amnesiac” Barton managed to battle back from near-elimination in the 2016 Hearthstone Americas Winter Championship to win the whole tournament on Sunday evening with a 3-1 finals victory over Nostam. Amnesiac emerged as a major North American talent last year, when he topped the regional server at the age of 14 and started to…

Blizzard’s Heroes Of The Dorm Returns To ESPN With A Case Of Esports March Madness

With less than a week before the bracket stage of the 2016 Heroes of the Dorm tournament, ESPN are once again trying to make the collegiate Heroes of the Storm competition into a nerdy, alternative March Madness. 64 collegiate teams have qualified from around North America to fight for fame, school pride, and the chance…

Last Night’s Record-Setting League Of Legends Match Lowered The Bar

In a Saturday night game that shattered the records for “creep score” recorded in a pro match, Echo Fox and Dignitas played an exciting, sloppy, and quintessentially North American League of Legends match that demonstrated why the region is consistently entertaining and consistently disrespected. Neither team was competing for a good playoff seed, nor even…

Team Secret The Only Winner At The DOTA 2 Shanghai Major

With a decisive 3-1 victory over Team Liquid on Sunday morning, Team Secret finally brought the troubled DOTA 2 Shanghai Major to a mostly-satisfying close. In a tournament where nothing had gone as expected, it was only fitting that two teams that entered as complete dark-horses vied for the $1.1 million grand prize while the…

Fnatic Win The IEM Katowice Counter-Strike Championship Using Magic Bullets

To nobody’s surprise, the unstoppable Fnatic Counter-Strike team claimed yet another major championship today, and put an end to Luminosity’s ongoing Cinderella story with a 3-0 finals sweep at IEM Katowice. That score doesn’t do justice to how hard Fnatic had to fight for this championship, and just how close Luminosity came to taking a…

Na’Vi’s Throwdown Against Luminosity Was Some Of The Year’s Best Counter-Strike

Today’s Counter-Strike duel at at the IEM Katowice tournament established itself as one of the best rounds of CS:GO of the year before it even reached the halfway mark. Then it got really good. On one side you had the established, reliable Na’Vi team: always a strong team and a challenger for a finals spot…

StarCraft II Pro Defends Perfectly Against Surprise Zerg All-In

Defending against a surprise Zerg rush usually ends with a GG. Defending against a surprise Zerg rush that’s already in our base, has to end with GG. But not for EJK, who managed to came back from a quite impossible situation. As EJK spots the Nydus worm (the nasty Zerg transport strain everyone hates) in…

America Narrowly Avoids Humiliation At Home Counter-Strike Tournament Qualifier

What started out as an underwhelming tournament for North American Counter-Strike ended on a more hopeful note as Team Liquid, Counter Logic Gaming, and Cloud9 eked out victories on Sunday to qualify for the MLG Columbus Counter-Strike tournament next month, where they will compete for a $500,000 grand prize. North American Counter-Strike is regarded as…

This Might Be The Worst Sequence In Pro League of Legends History

Sometimes, schadenfreude is the only winner of an NA LCS match. That’s certainly the case with this breathtaking series of miscues in the opening minutes of today’s Renegades vs. Dignitas League of Legends match, where the map itself scores the first four kills of the game. In the space of a minute, two players from…

Fired Dota 2 Commentator On Why Valve Dropped Him

James “2GD” Harding, an esports personality who was fired from his role as host of the Dota 2 Shanghai Major and renounced by Gabe Newell, has posted his explanation of the events that led to his removal from the event. In a long, almost stream-of-consciousness essay, Harding goes into the extensive history of his interactions…

Classic Rivals In A “Best Of The Rest” Battle In North American League of Legends

With Cloud9 and Counter Logic Gaming tied and Team SoloMid just one game behind them, this would be a dream season of League of Legends, if only it were still 2014. In 2016, it’s still pretty great, but it’s also bittersweet watching the big three of NA LCS playing their guts out for a (very)…

Why Fnatic Are The Best Counter-Strike Team

Fnatic are the greatest Counter-Strike team in the world right now. Just look at this crushing defeat they inflicted on Astralis in their final match today at the Barcelona CS:GO Invitational. Astralis were putting up an heroic fight against a heavily-favored Fnatic on the Inferno map. Astralis had tied the match after starting from a…

Two Top League Of Legends Players Duel With The Game On The Line

In a League of Legends match full of moments that were both ridiculous and amazing, Cloud9’s Hai and Team SoloMid’s Bjergsen may have taken the cake with this incredible nail-biter of a brawl. I’ll have lots more to say about this second-place match between TSM and Cloud9, which was the League of Legends equivalent of…

New Rules for Pro StarCraft Drive Legendary Player Off Team Liquid

Song “HerO” Hyeon Deok and Team Liquid announced today that HerO would no longer be a part of the Liquid organization after almost five years together. Since late 2011, HerO was one of the most prominent members of a team that has been at the heart of StarCraft in the English-speaking world. What’s important about…

Rick Fox’s Terrible League of Legends Team Has Five Weeks To Save Its Season

The visa problems that cropped-up in Riot’s League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) derailed a lot of teams’ best-laid plans, but no team suffered more damage than North America’s Echo Fox. They got a lot of attention when they were formed due to the glamor attached to their owner, former NBA star Rick Fox, and…