Esports

Your Odds of Being an eAthlete Esports is rapidly becoming one of the most popular ways for people to spend their time. League famously has 27 million daily users now, and DotA 2‘s the International was the largest tournament in history with a total prize pool of over $10,000,000. To put that in perspective, according…

Your Chances of Winning a Hearthstone Match if You Go First Who goes first in turn-based games has always been a point of contention, but Ars Technica crunched the numbers for professional Hearthstone matches. Their full analysis is pretty interesting overall, but they found that the first player won 110 out of 219 recorded matches.…

The Good And Bad of League Of Legends Patches

You could almost hear a hundred thousand viewers collectively hold their breath. Shen’s ultimate move, Stand United, which grants his ally a shield for up to five seconds and teleports him to their location after three, had been interrupted. The game was paused. Hundreds of gamers in attendance at Riot Games’ League of Legends Championship…

Watch The Finals Of The 2014 US Pokémon Championships Here

Miss the 2014 Pokémon Championships streams? The matches are up now on YouTube showing the junior, senior and masters finals. DOTA who-now? This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK The three finals show Cory Connor vs Miranda Burrows in the Juniors, Mackenzie Karouzos vs Zack Thornberg in the seniors and Adib Alam vs Alex Ogloza…

High Level Starcraft II Play Starts Here

StarCraft II might be off the radar nowadays, but that doesn’t mean the pros stopped getting better and better at the game. One highlight was a recent matchbetween two Koreans, Parting and Byul, where the Protoss veteran basically destroyed the Zerg with perfect control of only a few units. Here’s the full match below. After…

Paintball Can Be Badass With A Counter-Strike Sniper Rifle

The Asiimov skin for the AWP sniper rifle in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive can be a pricey one, $30 or a lot more if you’re not lucky. So buying one might not be the best idea. But modifying a generic paintball marker to match the one in CS:GO? That’s much better. Gaboer did just that and…

The International Dota 2 Championship that kicks off later this week will be streamed on ESPN3, Valve just announced. A special pre-show event “previewing the final match” will air on ESPN2 Sunday night at 8:30 PM Pacific Time. In addition to watching on the ESPN3 streaming service proper, Valve also said the event will be…

Fan Video Justifies All The Hype For The Big Dota Tournament

Compared to Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 doesn’t have that many Source Filmmaker shorts. Too bad, because Dota Cinema’s and Lozeng3r‘s SFM serves as proof that these things really have potential. They’ve made the clip to hype us all for the finals of The International and, well, it’s safe to say that it works. The…

The Most Intense Battle Of EVO 2014 So Far

With a $35,000 on the line — the largest pot of EVO 2014 — Keiji “Garireo” Okamoto and Ryo “Dogura” Nozaki put up the fight of their lives in the BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma grand finals. By the end of the match between Gariero’s Litchi and Dogura’s Azrael the audience was going crazy, the announcers had…

I Really Wanted The Other Guy To Win EVO’s King Of Fighters Tournament

How’s that for not spoiling the outcome? The EVO King of Fighters XIII finals came down to a riveting battle between Japan’s Hajime “Tokido” Taniguchi and China’s Zhuojun “Xiaohai” Zeng. The one I was rooting for did not win. Despite some excellent Iori dueling and excellent use of the annoying-as-hell Chin, in the end what…

Batgirl Sweeps The Evo Injustice Grand Finals

Sonic Fox Vs. Pig of the Hut, General Zod Vs. Batgirl — who won? The viewing public. Also, Batgirl. Update: Now with smooth video of the entire finals. Though Pig of the Hut managed to squeak by Sonic Fox in the winner’s finals of Evo’s Injustice: Gods Among Us tournament, Sonic Fox battled his way…

Tired of watching fighting games live? Watch StarCraft II live instead! We’re on Day Two of Red Bull Battle Grounds Atlanta, a StarCraft II event I was planning on attending back before I took over weekends. Let’s hope the competitors are better at planning than I am.

Watch The Pokémon National Championships Live, Right Here

The very best Pokémon video game and card players in the United States have converged in Indianapolis, Indiana this weekend to see who gets to lose to players from other countries in August’s World Championship. Let’s watch. Unlike other global competitions I could mention, the U.S. actually has a pretty good shot at taking home…

You Can Now Buy 3D-Printed Figurines Of League of Legends Pros

Pretty surprising way to promote an eSports team, but here they are: Team Dignitas‘ North American League of Legends team got unique 3D-printed figurines, and they are all available for $40 each. Here’s Kiwi, Shiphtur, Crumbzz, Zion, QT, and Scarra. Sadly they won’t say random LoL-related things if you squeeze them. via Cubify and Team-Dignitas.net…

Controversial Male-Only Game Tournament Is Now “Open for All”

After yesterday’s furor over the gender segregated World Championship events, the IeSF has issued a statement making some events open to anyone. This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK That means the previously International e-Sports Federation ‘male only’ competitions can now be entered by men or women, although curiously there’s still a “Female Competition” category—the…

Male-Only Video Game Tournament Sets Off Controversy

Women aren’t allowed to play Hearthstone in one upcoming multi-national tournament, and the gender discrimination has triggered a great deal of controversy this morning. The South Korea-based International eSports Federation holds competitions in various video games, split up by gender. This year’s games for men are Dota 2, StarCraft II, Hearthstone, and Ultra Street Fighter…

Health Issue Sparks DOTA 2 Controversy

There’s been some controversy over the weekend surrounding Valve’s big DOTA 2 tournament, The International, and how the company (and one team involved) has handled the roster of one of the competing teams. That team is Fnatic, and the player at the centre of the mess is Adrian “Era” Kryeziu (pictured, below), who suffers from…

Dota 2 Tournament Prize Pool Exceeds $10 Million

The prize pool for Valve’s big Dota 2 tournament ‘The International’ was already the largest in eSports history a month ago, when it was around $6 million. Today it exceeded $10 million which means it is now one of the biggest prize pools among any tournaments. To be exact, it’s currently a little bit more…

The MLG (Major League Gaming) Championship in Anaheim is going on all weekend long. You can watch people playing Call of Duty: Ghosts, Super Smash Bros. Melee, StarCraft II and Injustice: Gods Among Us much better than you right here.

‘Cheating’ Scandal Hits $10,000 Hearthstone Tournament

Yesterday, competitive Hearthstone player Radu “RDU” Dima won the DreamHack tournament for Blizzard’s digital card game, going home with $10,000. But the big win comes with an asterisk: during the second match of the finals, observers saw Dima’s in-game Hearthstone friends sending him in-game messages that included information about the cards in his opponent’s hand.…