EPTMight as well start at the beginning of the year with, officially winning several of the beyondgaming.com beta promotions for a bunch of prizes and a bit of cash. since the competitions were more of a most win/most games played thing I put in at least over 100 hours getting this stuff, but in the end its all great!
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/8tYYX51.jpg)
Over the past weekend there was a major lan event in Michigan called "Gamers for Giving" put on by an organization called gamers outreach. the event is for charity that runs an epic yearly sports/lan event. There was a League of legends, call of duty, halo 4 and of course a starcraft 2 tourney. They had some pretty epic cash prizes for the tournaments, kind of so epic, it did this to the NA tournament earnings for 2013 lol.
http://sc2earnings.com/?limit=50®ion=americas&year=2013
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/s6KwqpU.jpg)
Anyways they brought in celebrities/notable casters for each game,On the SC2 side of things the event flew in ROOTAxelToss from new york to cast the SC2 tourney. The event had some pretty decent stream viewership, not sure how much of it was from the SC2 community, But overall from donations and stuff the event raised over 15 grand for charity. Which was the goal the organization set to break, I would call a success as the event was also ran wonderfully from the SC2 side of things. As far as my play went, I played very solid games and crushed through the double elimination bo3 bracket without dropping a single map. Had some places where I got sloppy defending a terran 1/1/1 but in the end I recovered, made probes, denied drops, got it together for a nice comeback after losing most of my probes from the initial hellion harass. The tourney was also sponsored by Beyond Gaming, small world I know lol, But it was an awesome time sitting with those guys during the event. Even more so after winning the tourney and our late night 4v4's with hastro(pro cod/commentator). Just so many great times at the event cant seem to really list them all, and I promised in my last blog that I wouldn't do the gigantic never ending wall of text again.
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Just for the record, I am not short lol... AxelToss is surprisingly really tall. Kind of the same impression I got when I met Day9 several years ago, Why are these commentators so tall?
Though one thing that kind of bothered a few of my friends that were watching the stream was the constant flow of negative stream chat around me... Such as whenever axeltoss said hes GM,Someone replies with "no hes not! hes low master lol" or even stooping as low as calling me a diamond lol, I have 3 accounts in GM, though all fairly recently so something worth celebrating somewhat I guess. But my last to get promoted was my "main" NA account why I Put main in quotes is because technically its my account that I play in tournaments and stuff with and when I'm practicing specific things I tend not to ladder on that account for a while. But When ever I'm mentioned guess which account gets posted? obviously the one that everyone finds first rofl. Not the 2 that were GM, which was kind of the purpose of hiding builds and what I've been practicing and stuff leading into events. So I took this account a bit seriously and got to this point: http://www.sc2ranks.com/us/291685/KiFirE . Well guess that should put that to rest, though during the downtime for HOTS, I want to try and hit rank 1 on that account, should be doable but don't quote me on that =P Just cant screw around and fail cannon rush or try anything that I fail hard with and play solid macro games which is my strength. Just thought the GM thing was worth sharing as its been brought up a few times here on TL and other places and I Did finally get it on my NA account. But that is what happens when someone really doesn't care about rank to much and has been lost in the shuffle laddering on the KR server a lot. Though achieving GM on my own in KR would be nice(not a shared account) and due to global play I do have the ability on my own personal account so that's something to try for in HOTS.
Moving forward from this point? That's a good question, a lot of things are looking up and a lot of things are very confusing which I cant talk about in a blog post.(IE teams) Straightened out a lot of issues with stuff in my life lately and now I'm pushing forward again and feels like I'm making progress. Winning that Lan definitely helped a ton and just not financially. Got some real exposure, where will it lead no idea? I plan on getting my stream up and working in time for HOTS release, well working is a bad way to put it, But in quality, Stream overlays and massive boost in stream quality though having some set backs on getting the quality up there without killing the performance of the game and my own performance.But hopefully I get that straightened out and get some actual decent live content out. As far as casting and other content goes, That's much easier since all I need to do is have everything look nice. Have several ideas for guides and tutorials that aren't often talked about, and will have all new HOTS stuff coming. Hopefully I can also improve my skill at just talking and getting a point across,as if you read my blogs, I tend to start rambling and going on and on. And when its about strategy it kind of becomes really confusing as I tend to like to cover all angles of something. And here here I am starting to ramble, Some other people told me they took pictures of me at the event and were going to give them to me to post,So I will try to post them up when I get them. Thanks for reading, I will be around. Any questions I will also be around, Hope to get out to some bigger and better events with also bigger and better results in 2013!
