Good Morning folks and Happy Holidays! We’ll start of today’s Tuesday Telecast with the reminder that Des Moines Gaming Club is closed Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday this upcoming week. So to be clear those dates are December 24th-27th. That means the club is open for casual play today, tomorrow, and Thursday 1pm-10pm. So before we take that four-day break, be sure to stop into the club to get your gaming in. Wednesday we’ll still have our FIFA 22 tournament available for any of you soccer fans out there and then Thursday at 6:30 we’ll still have our weekly Smash Bros tournament.
This past weekend we held our first Halo Infinite tournament and it was a lot of fun. If you haven’t check it out, be sure to go watch all of the action from Saturday on our YouTube channel. We had 5 teams compete in this online tournament and it was so great to see this team based event go off so well. I even did some commentating during the tournament and even though I’m far from a professional, it was still a lot of fun. We hope to do more online events as it is nice to offer some competition where folks can play from the comfort of their own home, especially during COVID. Obviously, online format prevents 100% competitive integrity but when we do these online events we will only ever keep the pot to $5 per person so that there’s never a seriously large sum of money up for grabs. We’ll keep monthly tournaments and a majority of our weekly style tournaments to in person because competitive integrity is one of the main ideas behind DMGC. Still, there’s a lot of pros to online format so we do plan on doing more in the future.
Speaking of Halo Infinite, this past weekend was the first major tournament in the professional scene. HCS Raleigh kicked off on Friday and finished up on Sunday and it sure did garner a lot of attention. It was an open style format so there well over 100 amateur teams that had a chance to qualify into the championship bracket along with the professional organizations. Cloud 9 was the team that came out as champions in semi-dominating fashion. Eunited got 2nd, with FaZe getting third, Sentinels getting 4th, and OpTic Gaming getting 5th. The action was great and it’s truly a joy to see Halo back at the top of the esports world.
Elsewhere in esports news, Tommey has overtaken Aydan as the top Call of Duty Warzone earner. Tommey has won quite a few of the high-stakes Warzone tournaments since the release of the map Caldera. Tommey has now earned over $340,000 just from Warzone winnings’ alone beating out Aydan now by about $6,000. Despite all of the controversy surrounding the new warzone map and it’s updates, Warzone streamers and tournaments continue to get a lot of views. And while pros seems to generally dislike Caldera, it hasn’t really affected the main players base as playing numbers are staying about the same, which I guess is a little surprising since one of the recent updates to Warzone is the addition of Krampus who is a the anti-Santa in apline folklore. Now in games of Warzone and apparently even custom games, a warning will sometimes flash on player’s screens saying you are being hunted by Krampus. Then Krampus will appear and start attacking you with its claws and snowballs. It’s also very hard to kill. With that update, not sure if I personally want to play Warzone.
Finally, we’ll end today’s video with the mention of the Esports Festival that is going to be held at Grandview Univeristy here in Des Moines on January, 29th and 30th. It’s going to have tournaments in Valorant, League of Legends, Super Smash Bros., many different FGC titles, and other games. There will be prizes you can win, cosplay, and open play available! Registration is $30 and then you can enter into any tournament for free. We’ll be sharing more info on it soon, but the folks over at Unified Esports were kind enough to reach out to us so that they could establish some more local connections. They are also looking for TO’s and live-event staff and would prefer to higher locally. Depending on experience they typically pay anywhere from $10-$18 hour. If you are interested in applying you can reach out to me but like I said I’ll also be sharing more of that info soon!
That’l do it for today’s telecast, thanks so much for watching and I wish you all a happy holiday season.