From A to Xbox

With gaming going mainstream in the past couple years, especially in the U.S you might have come across the term E-Sports. E-Sports is a term that is popping up more and more these days and it stands for electronic sports. What do I mean by electronic sport? It’s a organized video game event where players compete against each other for prizes. These competitions can be on a countless number of different platforms. With prizes sometimes going up to almost $3.000.000, yep that high. On the International 2013 8 teams with a total of 40 players were competing for a total prize pool of $2,874,407.00 in a game called Dota 2.  The winning team, consisting of 5 Swedish players raked in almost a million and a half for winning the 2013 international competition.  Even though E-sports hasn’t been getting a lot of traction until just recently in the U.S, other countries like South Korea have had E-Sports as one of  their main entertainments. In South Korea the extremely popular StarCraft created by Blizzard has been the main sport of the country. Just like we as Americans love to watch Baseball and Football the South Koreans love to watch their players compete against each other in StarCraft. Being a pro-gamer is a legitimate career that comes with countless perks like good pay, fame and a big fan base.  However with the popularity this high comes with extremely high skill competitions, and with competition this high it means that you have to train, hours upon hours to be the top player.  Players join training houses in which they train sometimes even more than 12 hours a day honing their skills in the game.  Its rather quite amazing just how much training and dedication these guys put in to become the best of the best at the game.  Here is a great small clip about APM or actions per minute which shows how fast these players can move about on the screen and just how much multi-tasking is required to be one of the top players. APM with Nada and Moon. Now Korea isn’t the only place in the world where training houses and huge E-Sports events are located. All over the world including the U.S  comptetive gaming teams are being made, which actually attracts Koreans to come and play in places like the United States. Not so much because North American teams are better but that there is more money to be made here. Some of you might have noticed that during Comic Con there was a event also held there called IEM which means Intel Masters Extreme. The Intel Masters Extreme was a great E-sports event, especially since it was paired with Comic Con. Now if you’re feeling depressed because you wanted to check an event like this out, don’t worry! There is a Red Bull battle grounds event being held on November 23-24  at New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom. There 8 of the top players will be competing for a chance to win $50,000.

 Thanks to F5RGBlog for the images from MLG Anaheim 2013.