If you play video games you have probably heard of "e-sports." Even if you aren't a gamer yourself, you may have heard of colleges and universities across America offering scholarships for those who can play certain video games at an exceptionally high level. E-sports are even being debated for future Olympics.
E-sports aren't as physically demanding as traditional sports and often receive a large amount of hate from those that do not understand what exactly goes on in the world of gaming. Imagine going over strategies and attempting to discover some small bit of information that can give you an edge over the enemy with your coach, team of analysts, and sports psychologists. It sounds like I might be talking about football. Well, imagine practicing between 10 and 12 hours a day, the practice may not involve running up and down a field to train your endurance, but it does train knowledge of characters and items in the game. It may not matter the speed you can cover a 100m dash, but keeping your reaction time as sharp as possible is possibly the most important thing.
If you do play video games than you most likely have heard of "League of Legends," or LoL for short, a game actively run by Riot Games since 2009. LoL features 2 teams of 5 players attempting to destroy the magical power source of the opponents' base. With 132 playable characters and numerous items to power up your character, League of Legends may seem difficult to learn, but the production teams do all they can to make the spectator experience as good for new players as it is for those who have played the game for years.
Within the world of e-sports, League of Legends, has one of the highest quality viewer experiences with casting crews that rival the knowledge of American Football casters. The video game, as shocking as it may seem, has more players than Baseball. That is counting all levels of play, between little league, high school, college, minors, and MLB combined. In 2014, Riot Games reported that League of Legends had an average of 67 million unique players per month.
If you are wondering why this is impressive, why this might be so important to the gaming community, it is quite simple. Riot Games hosts a League of Legends World Championship every year. In production value and tournament structure, the World Championship is similar to the likes of the Super Bowl.
This year, 16 teams from across the globe will compete in some of America's biggest cities and stadiums. Starting in San Francisco for the "Group Stages" where the 16 teams are divided into 4 groups of 4 and face off in a round-robin. The best 2 teams from each of the 4 groups will travel to Chicago to compete in quarterfinals. From there surviving teams will travel to the semifinals at Madison Square Garden in NYC and finally the top 2 teams will compete in the Staples Center in Los Angeles for the "Summoner's Cup" and the title of best in the world.
Group Stages started on Thursday, Sept. 29th with teams from Brazil, China, Europe, Korea,North America, and more going head to head get the best chance at heading to quarterfinals. Group stages continue this weekend into Sunday.
You can tune in on the game streaming platform Twitch.tv or on Youtube and watch the battles unfold on the "Summoner's Rift." If you are interested in watching a match or two, you can find game times on Riot's e-sport site.
