Jul 092014 Tagged with ,

WCS America Season 2 Finals (2014)

You know what, I think the third time might really be the charm. In a world were WCS NA was questionably handled by both MLG and NASL, it seems that ESL has really dedicated an American team to doing this product justice.

I was able to attend the 2014 WCS America Season 2 Finals (yup, it’s still a mouth-full) in beautiful Burbank California at the brand-spankin-new ESL studios. This location really is new, and this was their first big SC2 broadcast. They had time to practice with Tanks and promos, but it seemed as if this was finally the real deal for them. The first real test. After whipping up the warehouse into a badass studio and production house, they put on one hell of a show for not only oodles of online viewers, but a packed house of SoCal local attendees. Thank’s for letting me clown around at your new home ESL.

So onto the event itself: In a world were I get most of my WCS knowledge from liquipedia, I started off a little under-enthused going into the Ro16. Major was there, but no players who I really cared about, or could have good dinner conversation with, made it. Luckily I had my hands full taking oodles of pictures of them smexy Korean’s. If you’d like to just look at pictures (maybe you hate my writing, maybe you always just had a thing for picture books and magazines, I don’t judge) you can look at them all here:  Day 1  // Day 2
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Jul 092014 Tagged with ,

The Fantasy Report: Week 7

Hey Now,

Welcome back to another exciting and super duper awesome Fantasy Report. With only three weeks left to go in Season 1, we will be spending our time doing a lot of TI4 stats, and I could not be more excited. It really is Christmas in July.

Is this your first time coming across the Fantasy Report? Welcome my friend. Allow me to indulge you with the world of fantasy dota. While Season 1 admittedly has some kinks, these first 7 weeks have been a lot of fun, and actually quite comparable to my fantasy NBA and NFL leagues. Putting in five to ten minuets a day utilizing the right resources can drastically improve your game, and help you win your league. These Fantasy Reports will be a repeating weekly articles to share tips, highlight rising stars, help with roster swaps, stats, and to discuss everything that is fantasy doto! If you would like to go back you can view and fantasy reports!

I am going to have to keep the Week 7 recap short this week to avoid copious amounts of flame and anger. tl;dr The fantasy system was fucked up. With only fringe league being played in the by week before TI, they failed to record stats for the few teams that were playing. Only 35 players reported scores this week, when in reality a good 70 should have posted. Even though they had their scores recorded in their profile, they did not calculate to the team. This effected leagues like: BoraDota, ZSword, Vietnam Esports CHampions League, GG League, DatBet, Western Digitial, and AMD D2M. Hyper Glory, LGD2, Invasion, Mineski, PR, CNB, Union, Titan, MVP, Arrow, and more all got fucked over. It wasn’t very cool. The system was actually broken. Like unplayable because of this. Regardless of how hard you tried, you might have goten a great pickup for this week (Invasion.Ghost) only to see him play a good 13 games, win most of them, and not score a single point. Sigh.
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Jul 032014 Tagged with ,

The Fantasy Report: Week 6

Hey Now,

First and foremost thank you to the warm fuzzy responses from the pilot Fantasy Report last week. You most definitely encouraged me to not toss this project to the wayside, and keep writing about fantasy on the weekly. I aim to not disappoint and keep these articles at a high quality. Thanks.

Is this your first time coming across the Fantasy Report? Welcome my friend. Allow me to indulge you with the world of fantasy dota. While Season 1 admittedly has some kinks, these first 6 weeks have been a lot of fun, and actually quite comparable to my fantasy NBA and NFL leagues. Putting in five to ten minuets a day utilizing the right resources can drastically improve your game, and help you win your league. These Fantasy Reports will be a repeating weekly articles to share tips, highlight rising stars, help with roster swaps, stats, and to discuss everything that is fantasy doto!

Week 6 was quite the exciting one. D2L, Good Play, and Bounty Hunter were all tournaments that ended early on in the week. Monday alone saw 900 points injected from 59 players. Arrow went on a tear winning two tournaments, and EG was equally impressive with their D2L win. When Arrow stopped playing, EG went on to end the week by playing 8 games Sunday and taking second place in ESL. Empire saw some action in D2L, but they gained some serious points by shit-stomping NaVi.US on Wednesday. Fun stats below.

Week 7 is going to be the foil to 6’s action-packed crazy antics. 7 is sure to be a real snore. As we build up to the start of TI4 in week 8, week 7 is our calm before the storm. I have done extensive research attempting to aggregate all of the match information this week. It was much harder than I thought it would be. Week 7 is going to be fantasy hell, as we see very, very, very few active fantasy teams and players. Even more so there is no good resource (gosubet, liquipedia, ingame calander) to schedule players off of.
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Jun 262014 Tagged with ,

The Fantasy Report: Week 5

Hey Now,

Are you playing Fantasy Dota yet? If you’re not then you are missing out on a new level of competitive dota immersion. Yes season 1 of fantasy league is a bit rough around the edges, but this new feature is laying the groundwork for griping competition outside of ancient defending.

These Fantasy Reports will be a repeating weekly articles to share tips, highlight rising stars, help with roster swaps, stats, and to discuss everything that is fantasy doto!

Week 5 was dominated by the Chinese scene. GEST, WVW, V Gaming, and CDEC all saw a ton of Chinese teams playing a massive amount of games. 101 potential games could have been played between DK, IG, Newbee, and Vici. That’s a shit ton of games, and it reflected in their point totals. Those four teams combined for a total of 2615 points. Newbee alone was 838 of those points. Hell I barely beat that with my hyper micro-managed team.

We also saw the Dreamhack conclusion, and a bit of western dota play. While these teams did not come close to matching the volume of games, and therefore points, of the Chinese teams, they did put up respectable numbers. Alliance netted a cool 205 points just in the finals.

Week six should be a lot quieter than week 5. Prepare for ongoing tournaments to wrap by Wednesday, and ESL to consume weekend dota. Remember that you get a player swap every day, so make the most to try and have an active roster, and prep for ESL.
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Jan 242014

2014

As I sit here lonely and bored on this rather uneventful Thursday, an update to this blog just seems “right.”

It’s 2014. Well it has been for almost a month now. Time flies as they say. Tis been a crazy time already. Turned 21 a few weeks ago. Visited Vegas and CES again this year. Started a montage of new TV shows for Winter. Final community college semester is a go. All of this stuff is exciting, and keeping me busy. In this fit of business I have this little nag in the back of my head that there is nothing going on HERE. It’s not like many people are stopping by, or waiting for content (and I may or may not loathe this), but the lack of regular anything is bothersome. I want this to be an eSports live event blog, but also so much more of an internet outlet for me. It says in the sidebar “Sometimes I also talk about other awesome things like TV, games, and food.” What’s stopping me from regular content of any sort? Am I too busy? Kinda. Am I too lazy? I don’t really thing so.

I really like lists. I keep a to-do list on my desk. It is an 8.5×11 piece of paper that breaks things into different categories. I love crossing things off. Keeps me organized and I feel makes me a more efficient human. I also keep a “someday-maybe” list. On here I have things that I want to do. Some of the things you might find on this list include: Reading a few select books, streaming, stop biting my nails, have a girlfriend. I really need to work on taking “Looseleafs being a thing” off that list. I recently took “Yelp Reviewer” off this list. I am enjoying the discipline, and writing outlet, of reviewing every place I go on yelp. I know that I will keep this up indefinitely, so why can I not put that drive into this casa?

I want to create content. Rawr.

If you’re interested in my single day at CES, here are the only 4 pictures I took:

<3

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