That French eSports team LDLC won the $250,000 DreamHack Winter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament wasn’t a huge surprise. They’re quite good and experts considered them quite capable of picking up 2-0 series wins in their playoff matchups. The real surprise was the LDLC overcame unusual circumstances that would have sunk other teams en route to that championship.
At one point, LDLC was out of the tournament after the quarterfinals having lost to Fnatic but a scandal over Fnatic using a “pixelwalking” exploit resulted in a protest, forfeiture and a storybook run for LDC to the DreamHack Winter Championship.
This week see the return of the eSports weekend calendar from a brief hiatus and it’s a busy weekend on the calendar. That’s because this weekend is DreamHack Winter 2014 in Jönköping, Sweden.
At DreamHack Winter, there are big tournaments for League of Legends, StarCraft II, Hearthstone and CS:GO running under the DreamHack banner. The Asus ROG Dream League is also running an event this weekend in Jönköping at DreamHack too. Basically, if you want live eSports action this weekend, you’re at or streaming DreamHack.
DreamHack, one of the biggest multidiscipline eSports event holders in the world, announced over the weekend that they were firing CEO Robert Ohlen just one month before the final DreamHack event of the year, DreamHack Winter.
The biggest tournament in the short eSports history of Blizzard’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft card game should have been a landmark moment for the game. Instead, the tournament’s final duel resulted in a controversial finish to the event. While RDU won the tournament with a 3-0 win over Amaz, the fans certainly weren’t happy with how the final played out.
It’ll be a while before eSports ever gets the credit it deserves from the mainstream establishment but that doesn’t mean that it already isn’t a massive industry. The recently held Dreamhack Winter 2013 had over 20,000 visitors on-site, almost 8 million unique views of the live streams, a near half-a-million dollar prize pool and a live performance by Darude.
For this and more neat info about Dreamhack Winter 2013, we have a handy infographic for your perusal.
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