Competitive Gaming Conglomerate: May 12 – 18

In the Competitive Gaming Conglomerate, I try to gather up all of the competitive gaming events that are happening for the week ahead. I’ll probably miss something, but let’s just hope I don’t. This competitive round-up is only for the tournaments and matches that you can spectate in some way, because no one likes to hear about all the awesome things they can’t take part in. Oh, and please note some games or genres may not appear each week depending on their specific tournament schedules, and that the CGC is constantly changing and developing.

StarCraft 2

StarCraft 2 returns this week with some familiar guests and a ton of new streamed tournaments. I honestly don’t think it’s possible to watch them all without four monitors and a heaping pile of methamphetamines.

To begin, here’s a quick rundown of the smaller tournaments taking place in the next seven days:

• Dailymotion Cup Group F. 5000€ (roughly $7200) prize pool sponsored by Dailymotion and the Electronic Sports League at 10:00 AM PDT on Thursday, May 12th.
• 4Players Close Combat Cup. 200€ (roughly $288) prize pool hosted by 4Players at 10:00 AM PDT on Thursday, May 12th.
• Wellplayed.org Community Open. 100$ prize pool sponsored by ASCWeekly.com Sponsor Prepaid Legal <http://ascweekly.com/sponsor >at 6:00 PM PDT on Friday, May 13th.

The IGN Pro League (IPL) returns this week with the Round of 16 for the qualifiers for Season 2. For those unfamiliar with IPL, it is the IGN Sponsored StarCraft 2 league which entered into the competitive StarCraft 2 scene with a relatively large bang. It wasn’t necessarily the prize pool that made the buzz, but more so the idea that IGN was sponsoring a tournament that had the chance to escalate into something larger than other American eSports. With IPL Season 1, we all got a taste of the incredibly high production value that the folks at WellPlayed.org are capable of producing. With the prize pool for the second season rising to $50,000 (up from $5,000), look for everything to get a whole lot bigger.

This Thursday and Friday, you can catch IPL qualifiers beginning at 3 PM PST. Like every broadcast for the IPL, you can catch them on either their Justin.tv stream or the regular IPL page. On Thursday, I’d have to place my own excited eyes on SixjaxViBE vs. MouzHasuobs, and the following day with FnaticNightend vs. coLstalife. All of the matches should prove to be pretty exciting, but those are definitely the ones I’m going to be watching.

The GOMTV May Starleague continues onward with the Code S Finals between InCa (Protoss) and NesTea (Zerg). The two Korean players will face off in a best-of-seven series on Friday at 11:10 PM PDT. Believe it or not, that’s all we have for GOMTV this week. If you can’t get enough of the K-pop or the whole GOMTV scene, then you can always check out videos from the previous matches of GOMTV May on their site. Of course, the videos are in standard definition, and you’ll have to pay if you want the high quality videos, but you’re not missing any actual content otherwise.

Week five of the North American Star League (NASL) kicked off last last night at 5:30 PM PDT and continues on, just like last week, until Sunday. (For future reference, the NASL will be sticking to this schedule until June 11th.) As usual, if you cannot watch the games due to time zone differences, they’re rebroadcast at 6 PM GMT/7 PM CET every night of the regular broadcasts. You can watch the games in 480p on Justin.tv at their season one account. If you want to view the games in higher quality, you’ll have to pay for a $25 season pass. I don’t have the high quality streams, but 1080p StarCraft II matches seems attractive.

With the third TeamLiquid StarLeague (TSL) coming to a close, we’ll be seeing the third place matches and the grand finals this weekend. Cast by DjWheat and Husky, Empire.Kas and mouz.HasuObs will be facing off for third place in a best-of-7 series Saturday at 11 PM PDT. Even at third place, a prize of $3000 isn’t anything to chuckle at.

However, it’s relatively small compared to the first place prize of $15,000 that Dignitas.NaNiwa and mouz.ThorZaIN will be fighting the final fight for on Sunday. Cast by Chill and Day9, it should be a really awesome match between the two rising juggernauts. ThorZaIN has been making waves lately with the essential crush of FruitDealer (GOMTV Star League 1 winner) in the round of 32 in this same tournament, but he continued on to beat TSL 2 champion LiquidTyler receiving no losses. With ThorZaIN’s studded TSL record (and other great showings), we should be seeing something awesome out of him in the finals. But hey, let’s not give all the impressive praise just to ThorZaIN. NaNiwa isn’t anything to shrug at either. Currently showcasing zero losses in NASL S1 and taking out other impressive contenders in the TSL3 like Ret, he’s really a name to watch if you haven’t been already.

The grand finals of TSL3 will be held Sunday at 11 AM PDT on their livestream. Don’t stay up too late on Saturday if you don’t want to miss it.

My lord, that was a lot of StarCraft.

MOBA/Arena Games

On the topic of League of Legends, it’s extremely hard to find any tournaments that are being streamed live. Counter Logic Gaming does have many live streams going about all day long, but there aren’t very many scheduled streams for tournaments due to the lack of a proper spectator interface. Until Riot Games (League of Legends developers) implements this, I doubt we’ll see very many tournaments streamed—with the exception of huge events like DreamHack, WCG or Riot sponsored events where they have an in-house pseudo-spectator view. If you have any information on the League of Legends tournaments, or any tournaments that are being streamed, please let me know. I’d love to include this game into the CGC, but I haven’t been able to find anything that is being live streamed. There are many tournaments going on, but I’ve failed to find anything that anyone can watch online.

It seems that the only notable event this week that is being streamed (or even happening) is the GosuCup Main Event Group Stage where phB will face off against DskB. With the match scheduled to happen at 12 PM PST on Wednesday of this week, we won’t be viewing it live, but we will be able to view a replay commentated by HonCast on Friday at 1 PM PST. The GosuCup is a running tournament with a $3000 prize pool that began in early May and is still (obviously) running. For those who keep up on the competitive HoN scene, it showcases teams like EG, FnaticMSI, Infs, and PhB – all of whom have made large showings for a fairly long time in the competitive scene.

The Beyond Gaming 3vs3 Open returns this week on Saturday at 11 AM PST, and like last week, you can view all of the Qualifying Tournaments and Ladders as well as the grand finals on their Justin.tv Stream. This is the second of four qualifying tournaments for the Grand Final Tournament that will take place at a later date. This, like every qualifying tournament, boasts a $300 dollar first place prize as well as a few other neat prizes you can see on the promo page. The ladder games are said to be streamed on the Justin.tv page, but there are no set dates for the stream. You can follow the live stream on Justin.tv to find out when the Beyond Gaming ladder games will be live.

Fighting Games

This week is a fairly large week for the Mortal Kombat 9 scene with a huge tournament sponsored by Performance Designed Products. But why is the National Mortal Kombat 9 Tournament so big? Well, PDP is guaranteeing a $21,000 prize pool for the top 8 finalists, with the first place winner receiving $10,000 in cash. The event is being held at Bally’s Hotel and Casino Grand Ballroom in Las Vegas.

If all those fancy details made you eager to sign up, it’s unfortunately too late. The tournament registration ended Monday, but you can still watch the tournament and dream about what might have been this Saturday and Sunday, May 14 and 15th. There aren’t any specific time frames for when the tournament will be live, but it’s going to be streamed by Team Sp00ky. If you don’t know about Team Sp00ky, they’re one of the larger handles on streaming within the fighting game community, and their stream is high quality. They’ve streamed a lot of events, and I’m really glad to see them streaming the largest Mortal Kombat 9 tournament to-date. When Saturday hits check out their Justin.tv page, or their Twitter for more info on exactly when they’ll be streaming.