We are back! Sorry for the long hiatus but even I need a vacation every now and then. But even the flow of esports news and events hasn’t stopped in my absence. We have a LOT to cover. I’ll be going over two months of competitions and to compensate the vastness of news (including five world championships!), the format will change a little bit. Instead of segments focusing on individual events, each esport will get its own segment. Now with that said let’s get into it!

DOTA 2

For DOTA fans it is that time once again. It is the International! The biggest prize pool tournament of all of esports is upon us once more. The previous two months saw ferocious fighting for a spot in TI 2023. Shocking news also hit the DOTA 2 scene as Valve announced that the Dota Pro Circuit, will cease after the conclusion of TI 2023. What this means is that a new format for competitions will begin next year, details have yet to be released. Personally, I am not a fan of this move. Having regular play and a regulation system is a great way to build your leagues and I view this as a step back.

Twelve teams directly qualified for TI from DPC points. This includes dominant favorite Gaimin Gladiators, who have won every major tournament this year. They are joined by Team Liquid, Tundra Esports, 9Pandas, Evil Geniuses, LGD Gaming, Shopify Rebellion, Talon Esports, beastcoast, Team Spirit, TSM and BetBoom Team. This leaves eight spot remaining for the qualifier teams. In North America, American organization nouns sweeps B8, a Ukrainian team, for the only North American spot. In South America, Keyd Stars from Brazil takes the upper bracket spot and Thunder Awaken of Peru survives the lower bracket for the second spot. The Western Europe qualifiers saw some chaos as historic fan favorites OG and Team Secret were knocked out early. This would allow Quest Esports from Qatar and Entity, an Indian organization sponsoring a European team, to survive to take the two spots. In the Eastern Europe, despite the whole community rooting for them to lose, Russian organization Virtus.pro survive to take the spot, including a win over Ukrainian organization Natus Vincere. Even esports needs a villain I suppose. In China, Azure Ray survive a stacked tournament with a 3 to 1 grand final win over Xtreme Gaming. Finally in Southeast Asia, underdog Team SMG came out on top.

The International starts next week on October 12^th and will run to October 29^th. The tournament will be hosted in its historic home of Seattle, Washington with the Grand Finals being played in the Climate Pledge Arena, the home to the Seattle Kraken, the local NHL team.

Valorant

Valorant in the last two months is a tale of two stories. The Valorant World Championship in August and the beginning of the off season in September. In the Valorant World Championship, sixteen teams from four regions were invited to compete in person in Los Angeles with the final four to be played in the historic KIA Forum. The favorites heading in were Fnatic, who were looking to complete the Triple Crown, winners of Lock/In, Masters and Champions.

In the Group Stage, two stories emerged. Contenders NRG from North America and Team Liquid from Europe, headed in as the only two teams believed to be able to fight against Fnatic, were eliminated early. The second story is the surprising skill showcased by the Chinese representatives, with Edward Gaming and Bilibili Gaming surviving to the playoff stage. In the playoffs stage, Fnatic is stunned by the Brazilian powerhouse, LOUD in a clean 2 – 0 win, and forced to the lower bracket. Paper Rex from Singapore continued their run of dominance with wins over FUT esports and LOUD to meet the other American team in the tournament, Evil Geniuses. Paper Rex would win the upper bracket match 2 to 1, to secure a spot in the Grand Finals. Fnatic bounced back from the early defeat to defeat FUT esports and DRX for a rematch against LOUD. However, LOUD would repeat their success as they dash Fnatic’s hopes for the Triple Crown. LOUD would not be able to overcome Evil Geniuses in the lower bracket finals in a barn burner of a match coming down to the final map, Evil Geniuses emerged victorious 3 – 2. In a rematch from the Upper Bracket, the Grand Finals saw Evil Geniuses pulled the reverse card and win in four maps, 3 – 1. Evil Geniuses with this win takes home the $1,000,000 grand prize and complete one of the biggest team comebacks in esports history. Last year, Evil Geniuses appeared to be an unremarkable team and at the start of the year that trend continued as they struggled at the opening tournament of Lock/In in Brazil. But slowly under the leadership of their coach, Christine ‘potter’ Chi, Evil Geniuses turned around and became a unit. Demon1 from Evil Geniuses would take home the MVP Award.

September saw the beginning of the Valorant off season. Minor third-party tournaments are being held to keep players in form and trades and new acquisitions began. However, this isn’t the end of major play in Valorant as the Women’s League, known as Game Changers, is still underway. The Game Changers World Championship will be an offline tournament taking place in Sao Paulo, Brazil in late November.

Counter-Strike

For Counter Strike players, we are nearing the end of an era. CSGO is on the verge of retirement. With Counter Strike 2 now out, pro players begin their preparation for the switch to the new game. Valve and tournament organizers announced that IEM Syndey, which will take place latter on this month, will be the final CSGO tournament.

August and September still say pro teams compete against each other so let’s get into that. First, in August was the Gamers8 tournament taken place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Sixteen teams were directly invited to a single elimination bracket. Defending Major Champions, Team Vitality, would emerge victorious here as well with victories over MIBR, G2 Esports and their rivals Natus Vincere. The Finnish wonders, in ENCE, forced Team Vitality to three maps, but the French superpower pushed through them.

The other tournament was the ESL Pro League, entering its 18^th season. An offline tourney taking place on the island country of Malta, thirty-two teams, a strong mix of direct invites, contenders, superpowers and up and coming teams. The month-long tournament say Natus Vincere return to form, as the Ukrainian juggernauts swept through their group without a single map loss. Eternal Fire, a Turkish team and near unheard of until this tournament, made a name for themselves as they qualified to the playoffs and got big wins over established teams like Astralis, Cloud 9, Team Liquid and BIG. NAVI would get to the finals, with a win over fellow Ukrainian team, MONTE, to meet the German team, MOUZ. However, the Germans would sweep NAVI 3 – 0 and claim the win. With the first-place finish, MOUZ earned a direct invite to IEM Katowice 2024 and the BLAST World Final 2023.

Rocket League

For the majority of the past two months, Rocket League entered its offseason, but it did manage to crown its World Champion back in August. Taken place in the PSD Bank Dome in Dusseldorf, Germany, the RLCS World Championship hosted twenty-four teams, who qualified from points collected throughout the season. The first stage consisted of the lower seeded teams to fight through the Wildcard Swiss Stage. Sixteen teams were to be cut down to eight. Oxygen Esports, despite opening with a win, would miss out on the rest of the tournament with a huge collapse in performance. They would be the only team who after winning their opening match, to be eliminated in Wildcards. The remaining teams would join the top seeds in the Group Stage. In Group A, the top seeds dominated as Team BDS, Team Liquid and Karmine Corp all qualified. The surprise of the Group would be Team Falcons, the representatives from Saudi Arabia, they would edge out the South American representative KRU Esports, to qualify for playoffs. In Group B, the American top seeds had two different tales. Faze Clan is knocked out quickly and with a whimper, as they only managed 3 wins out of 11 played. Gen.G on the other hand managed to qualify without a loss. The French superpower, Team Vitality, also continued their dominance. Spacestation Gaming, a scrappy American Wildcard team, qualified and were joined by fellow American team, G2 Esports. In the playoff stage, all of the European teams knocked out their American and Middle Eastern counterparts. Team Vitality and Team BDS would meet in the Grand Finals, where the French sweep the Swiss, 4 – 0. Team Vitality’s win here marked the fourth year in Europe’s dominance in the esport, granted that two of those years was during the COVID pandemic, where two World Championships were canceled.

League of Legends

For LoL, the past two months were building up to the World Championship that will start on the 10^th of October. The Premier Leagues in North America, Europe, China and Korea, all wrapped up their seasons and hosted their final regional playoffs. In North America, NRG defeated Cloud 9, 3 – 1. They will be joined by Team Liquid as the three teams to represent North America at Worlds. JD Gaming won the Chinese Summer Split to qualify directly to Worlds. They will be joined by Bilibili Gaming, LNG Esports and Weibo Gaming. In Korea, Gen.G take first place in the Summer Split. Three-time World Chamion, Faker and his team, T1 also qualify for Worlds, along with KT Rolster and Dplus. Finally, in Europe, G2 emerge as the top dog and will be joined by Fnatic and MAD Lions. All of these Premier teams get to skip the play-in stage, which will feature teams from the smaller regions. PSG Talon and CTBC Flying Oyster from Taiwan, Rainbow7 from Latin America, LOUD from Brazil, Detonation FocusMe from Japan, and Gam Esports and Team Whales from Vietnam. Worlds will be split amongst different venues in the Korean cities of Busan and Seoul, with the Grand Finals being held in the Gocheok Sky Dome.

Apex Legends

The ALGS in September crowned its World Champion at a LAN tournament that was hosted in Birmingham, United Kingdom. The 2022- 2023 season is the third official circuit of the ALGS. Forty teams qualified for the tournament, making the ALGS Worlds the biggest event, with number of teams is concerned. The forty teams were divided into four groups of ten for the first stage of the tourney. Split 2 Playoff winners, DarkZero Esports finished at the top of the table with a total of 176 points with the cut off for teams going to either the upper or lower bracket being 103. In the bracket stage, 100Thieves, a popular American organization, finished in dead last gathering only 10 points in 8 matches. Fnatic and Complexity avoid elimination in the first lower bracket. In the winners bracket, DarkZero faults and just barely misses the cut off with Luminosity’s Mexican division dominating. In the second round of lower bracket many more popular organizations were eliminated including DarkZero, Northeption, Fnatic, Sentinels, XSet and Complexity. In the Grand Finals, teams play until one team gets three wins, regardless of points. Optic Gaming reached two wins after only 3 rounds, but in the following five, weren’t able to close it out. Instead it would be Team Solomid, who would win the last three rounds in succession to sneak away the Championship. They will run away with the $600,000 top prize and the two player awards; the MVP and Positive Player.

Rainbow 6

Rainbow 6 had been on hiatus for the better part of the entire summer, only to resume last month with the second split of their competitive year for the ten regional leagues. Actually, at the time of writing this article, all of the leagues finished their play and the scene has moved onto their Last Chance Qualifiers where teams fight for the last spots for BLAST R6 Major taking place in Atlanta. The following teams finished at the top of their regions; Virtus.pro (Europe), Soniqs (North America), Faze Clan (Brazil), SCARZ (Japan), Dplus (Korea), Alpha Atheris (LATAM), Shaheens (South Asia), Bleed Esports (Southeast Asia), Team Bliss (Oceania) and Geekay Esports (Middle East). Fourteen more teams will join these ten, including eight from the last chance qualifiers taking place right now. The BLAST R6 Major will begin on Halloween.

Overwatch

Oh Overwatch, your fall from grace was quick and brutal and your esports division wasn’t spared from this disaster. Blizzard has a history of not supporting its esports scenes and that trend continues not just for Overwatch, but for Call of Duty as well. Both scenes will be losing their premier leagues, the OWL and the CDL respectively. OWL concluded their final playoffs at the start of the month. Eight teams qualified after a long year. In the bracket stage four of the eight emerged; Hangzhou Spark, Houston Outlaws, Boston Uprising and the Florida Mayhem. It would be the Florida Mayhem who will emerge victorious with a 3 – 1 win over Boston and a 4 – 0 sweep over Houston in the Grand Finals to take the final OWL Championship. What solidified concerns was the send off at the end of the stream by the entire broadcast team. Technically, Overwatch still has the World Cup in late October and the OWL can be saved if the majority of the team owners sign on, but that doesn’t look it will happen.

PUBG

PUBG held two tournaments in the two months, the second major of its PGS series and the PUBG Nations Cup. At PGS2, similar stories continued, Luminosity Gaming continue to struggle at the international stage, Cerberus Esports push the idea that Vietnam is the most explosive region to watch in the game and Europe dominating early stages of the tournament. However, the eventual winner would be the Soniqs, the American powerhouse. They would take home the first-place prize and a guaranteed slot to PGC. They will be joined by 17 Gaming, Twisted Minds and Danawa Esports as the four teams that qualify based on performances at the two international majors. Speaking of Danawa, their roster made up the entirety of the South Korean national team that competed at the PUNG Nations Cup, hosted in their home nation. Despite the best efforts of Vietnam and defending cup holder United Kingdom, the Koreans took home three chicken dinners of the eighteen rounds played and finished with 172 points, which is over thirty more of the second-place team.

Pokemon

Just wanted to briefly touch upon Pokemon and congratulate the following teams/individuals who walked away champions. Luminosity Gaming (Pokemon Unite World Champions), ItsAXN (Pokemon GO Champion), Vance Kelley (Pokemon TCG Champion) and Shohei Kimura (Video Game World Champion)

Fighting Games

The final area of news is centered on fighting games. For Smash, the community said goodbye for a major tournament, Shine, a tournament held in Worcester, Massachusetts, as the organizers folded the tournament due to financial reasons. Light would win the Ultimate singles tournament and Cody Schwab wins Melee. Apple Reviewer and Antimony win Ultimate doubles and Swedish Delight and Polish win Melee. At Super Smash Con, acola wins the Ultimate Singles and alongside his partner Miya, also wins the doubles. Two premier tournaments also took place. At Delfino Maza, Sparg0 defeated Gluttony in the Singles finals and number one ranked player MkLeo along with his partner MKBigBoss win doubles. Gluttony would avenge his defeat by winning the singles tournament at Tera in his home nation of France.