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motbob
United States12546 Posts
A young man hunches over his computer, focused intently on a game of Starcraft 2. Surrounding him are his teammates, all staring at the screen with identical concentration. The player at the computer is Antaran, a Terran playing for the University of Cincinnati stagecraft team. The game is the deciding match against the University of Pittsburgh; the match is currently at 3-3. The winner goes to the finals to face the powerful University of Indiana. The loser goes home.
To an uninformed looker-on, things look like they are going poorly for UC. The mood looks somber, with a stolid, intense expression on the face of the observers. When the man at the computer loses a dropship, he physically reacts and shakes his head in frustration.
But, as it turns out, the game has already been won. A few minutes before this scene took place, the two combatants in the game exchanged siege tank and marine armies in the middle of Shattered Temple. At the same time, a drop by Antaran took out nearly all of his opponent's SCVs, and a desperation counter-attack was cleaned up. Now, all Antaran must do is press the advantage and end the game. Carefully.
When he finally sieges up at his opponent's natural and wipes out the SCV and marine army thrown at him in desperation, GG appears on the screen. The dam of emotion breaks. Antaran receives more pats on the back than he's ever gotten in his life. The Cincinnati players can be heard celebrating throughout the venue. "Yeah! Woooo!" "Not confident in TvT, huh?? You looked like a fucking boss out there!" "I almost pissed myself!" "That drop was so clutch." "We're in the FINALS!"
This is eSports. This is what it's all about.
This is the Collegiate eSports Series Invitational (CES), an event that happened yesterday, April 9th. 24 teams from around the country were invited to Indianapolis to compete for a prize pool of $5,000. This blog gives a short report on this awesome event.
I was there, not because I was a part of any team, but because I wanted to meet up with a few other TL members who were going to be there: heyoka, a leader of the writing team at Team Liquid, and TrueRedemption, a member of the GSL writing team. True actually helped organize the event, and was planning to cast most of it until the all-star casting team of JP, CatsPajamas, and Wolf volunteered. So True ended up running the show from behind the scenes, doing a great job of making sure everything was going smoothly.
I want to give a big shootout to Nos, the main sponsor of the event. A big prize pool. An awesome venue (with free parking on the street of the freaking venue, how awesome is that???). Free food for the competitors and spectators (Jimmy John's subs and Domino's Pizza). Free mints and candy (omg). Free Nos energy drinks and Powerade. They even sent out MLG_Lee to help out with organization, and gave out MLG Columbus passes to the top three teams. So cool!
The venue was awesome. Great ventilation, flawless internet, and vintage cars all over the place. The team I was hanging out with was situated right next to a beautiful white Ferrari Corvette. We tried not to lean on the cars when spectating!
Heyoka was traveling with the University of Wisconsin SC2 team, though he wasn't playing. His team barely didn't make it out of the group stages, playing an ace match tiebreaker game against MIT for the final spot in the elimination brackets. The Terran ace for Wisconsin lost in an insane 2-stargate-into-base-race where 20 hp on a voidray meant the difference between victory and stalemate and a final, unsniped probe at the end meant the difference between stalemate and defeat.
The game was actually sort of irrelevant, though, since the winner of the game (MIT) went on to face Indiana in the knockout rounds. With three semipros, and with Murder as their ace, Indiana was by far the favorite to win the whole thing. They did, 4-0ing MIT in the process.
When teams were knocked out of contention, I saw a whole lot of 4v4, UMS, and TSL watching. A lot of teams left early, but a lot of teams stayed until the end, as well!
Another great part of the venue was the spectator area. The organizers set up big screen TVs hooked up to laptops with chairs set up all around, so watching the stream with buddies was easy. At one point, the stream went down for about half an hour, and I put up some TSL VODs. Some random guy walked by, looked at the screen, looked at us, said "Tyler sucks", and walked away. It was incredibly random. He was right, I guess!
I met some awesome people at the event. A fellow spectator by the name of Dunsford ruminated with me on the nature of e-fame (he had been featured on a Funday Monday at one point and had been recognized sporadically since then). Speaking of e-fame, I introduced myself to JP and he knew who I was! "I use your stuff on SC Center all the time, no joke." While we were talking, Wolf overheard and said, "motbob's here?" While the three of us were jabbering, CatsPajamas came from backstage and said "Did somebody say motbob????" It was surreal. Huge ego boost. I also introduced myself to MLG_Lee and he remembered me too! We talked about extended series for a little while.
I had stupid smile on my face all day long. It was a whole lot of fun, and if there's a second event, I definitely want to go (and maybe work staff!)
I don't have any pictures. If someone else does, link me to them, please!
 
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This event was so well run, it just made for a great day. Huge props to everyone behind the scenes putting it on. I didn't watch the stream much (was mainly watching my team play), so cant really comment on that, but everything for us went really smoothly. The one worry was the HUGE lag on the internet at the beginning of the day, but they took care of that extremely quickly and we had no more problems the rest of the day.
Venue worked out great, plenty of space for everyone. I second the shoutout to NOS. They had a TON of stuff for us there. Definitely hoping there's another one next year so I can go! Hopefully we wont get a bad draw in the bracket again 
(oh and sorry, no pictures for you motbob...)
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T.O.P.
Hong Kong4685 Posts
Sounds like an awesome event. I hope they hold one of these in Socal. There were a lot of good teams who rejected the invitation because the cost of airfare and hotel was too expensive.
They should host a MLG in LA too. A MLG in LA would attract a record number of spectators.
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On April 11 2011 06:43 T.O.P. wrote:
Sounds like an awesome event. I hope they hold one of these in Socal. There were a lot of good teams who rejected the invitation because the cost of airfare and hotel was too expensive.
They should host a MLG in LA too. A MLG in LA would attract a record number of spectators.
There's going to be an MLG in Anaheim, which is pretty close!
I wanted to go to CES but our school had to turn down the invitation as well =( The travel expenses were just too much but I was jelly of everyone who got to go. That being said they did offer $100 to the team to cover travel expenses, which was nice, but for the teams farther away it wouldn't have helped too much.
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I was there and had tons of fun. Lots of great matches and friendly people. Too bad I didn't know you were going motbob or I would have looked out for you! In retrospect it would have made sense to try to organize a post-event TL meetup for drinks to celebrate/drown in sorrow 
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Sounds like a blast. Looking forward to future CES events.
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The venue was awesome. Great ventilation, flawless internet, and vintage cars all over the place. The team I was hanging out with was situated right next to a beautiful white Ferrari. We tried not to lean on the cars when spectating!
Haha, thank you =]
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oh wtf you were there too?
I was there but too busy trying to practice/play matches while working on the backend T_T
Yea, we need a meetup thread next time lol.
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LOL, the fact that me knowing who you were gives you an ego boost gives ME an ego boost, because I'm still a nobody.
In any case, the event was absolutely incredible. I loved everyone involved, and absolutely had the time of my life casting.
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It's all cause of the S Class / Code S / Grandmaster League beard Cats ;D
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You're not a nobody, CatsPJs! I was very happy to meet you at MLG Dallas (not fanboy happy, but still!) TBH, I didn't know who you were until a few weeks ago, but I thought, "man, this guy is a terrific caster."
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Wait, free food and parking? I can't even tell you how awful paying at least $15 for parking at MLG Dallas last season was (and, if I had been there for longer, it would have skyrocketed even higher really, really quickly).
I enjoyed some of the games, but, unfortunately, I just could not watch the stream very much because the lag on it was almost unbearable at many points. 
I did hear some things on stream about how it was all formed, though, and I'm really impressed with Nos and the sponsors/partners (i.e., the MLG coordination). Keep up the good work, guys! If Nos keeps it up they might be able to achieve a status like Kingston, who is receiving tons of love letters because of all they've done (especially after PAX East).
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Katowice25012 Posts
That white car was a Stingray, the Ferrari was the red one we walked past to get to the spectator area.
This whole event was really fun, live team based competition is an incredible experience. All the players got these sweet tshirts with sponsors logos and your team name on the back, my team loved them so much everyone wore them back on Sunday. There is some serious potential for events like this in the future, weekend was a blast and everyone on our CSL team is now super pumped to play and compete more. It also makes competing really accessible to people of any skill level and creates strong friendships which is sick.
Best part of weekend was drunk 40-something woman asking us if we were a ping pong team Saturday night.
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Despite my initial cynicism over the event (I'm always hesitant ), this looked like it was awesome. I wish Dalhousie could've been there, though it took place during our exam period, and it would have been way too expensive for us to attend.
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Poor Tyler
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This sounds awesome, wish I lived in America
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On April 11 2011 18:44 heyoka wrote:
That white car was a Stingray, the Ferrari was the red one we walked past to get to the spectator area.
This whole event was really fun, live team based competition is an incredible experience. All the players got these sweet tshirts with sponsors logos and your team name on the back, my team loved them so much everyone wore them back on Sunday. There is some serious potential for events like this in the future, weekend was a blast and everyone on our CSL team is now super pumped to play and compete more. It also makes competing really accessible to people of any skill level and creates strong friendships which is sick.
Best part of weekend was drunk 40-something woman asking us if we were a ping pong team Saturday night.
"ping pong champions of the world" yes, epic indeed
and that guy pulling over asking us if we had cigs
it was nice meeting heyoka and motbob  and giving ride back tired as fuck with mass NOS to keep me alive, while possibly slightly exceeding the speed limit.
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On April 11 2011 06:16 motbob wrote:
Some random guy walked by, looked at the screen, looked at us, said "Tyler sucks", and walked away. It was incredibly random. He was right, I guess!
Aw. Were you wearing your TL shirt?
I also introduced myself to MLG_Lee and he remembered me too! We talked about extended series for a little while.
Hahahaha.
Really nice write up. The event sounds more amazing than I ever could have imagined, and by the sound of it a lot of that is because of Nos, so good for them. I also noticed the itmeJP stream was on for most of the day yesterday. At the time I just thought, "wow, he's really just streaming college SC2 for hours and hours?". Boy do I feel like an idiot.
I'm gonna bust my ass to see if I can make it to my university's team. This sounds like an amazing event to go to.
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On April 11 2011 06:16 motbob wrote:
I was there, not because I was a part of any team, but because I wanted to meet up with a few other TL members who were going to be there: heyoka, a leader of the writing team at Team Liquid, and TrueRedemption, a member of the GSL writing team. True actually helped organize the event, and was planning to cast most of it until the all-star casting team of JP, CatsPajamas, and Wolf volunteered. So True ended up running the show from behind the scenes, doing a great job of making sure everything was going smoothly.
TrueRedemption did such a great job of helping things run smoothly. He really deserves a ton of credit for all the work he put in and how accommodating he was when teams had issues.
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Yeah this was an incredible event. Some of the most fun I have ever had playing Starcraft 1 or 2.
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EPT
