Good Morning! Hope everyone is doing well. It’s Tuesday so that means it’s time for Des Moines Gaming Club’s weekly update. The big thing to point out this week is that our Smash Monthly, Downtown Duels, is this Saturday! Doubles in both Ultimate and Melee start at Noon and Singles start at 1:30pm. As usual the venue fee is $7, only $5 if you bring a setup. The pot fees for the tournaments are $5 for doubles and $8 for singles. Des Moines Gaming Club will provide $100 of pot bonus split between Ultimate and Melee singles based on attendance. You can sign up online at smashgg by simply searching downtown duels or you can sign up in person when you arrive before the tournament on Saturday. Doors will open at 11. The club will be closed for casual play on Saturday due to the Smash monthly. Can’t wait, Downtown Duels is always a blast!
Just two days ago on Sunday we hosted our second B-Side FGC tournament and that was a lot of fun! Great group of players with a lot of great sets! The games were BlazBlue Central Fiction, Vampire Savior, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2, and Persona 4 Ultimax. I believe there was also a side tournament of Marvel 3. The B-Side tournament is great because the tournaments are for older games, the sets aren’t as serious, and so it just offers a different vibe compared to our main monthly tournaments like Downtown Duels or Clash in the Capital. We will likely keep the B-Side tournament on Sundays as well just offer a monthly tournament on a different day other than Saturday.
So moving on to our schedule for this week, it’s normal except for Saturday due to Downtown Duels. Casual play is available Tuesday-Thursday 1pm-10pm, Friday 1pm-11pm, and Sunday 11am-5pm. The weekly tournament schedule is regular too with FGC night wednesday at 7pm with tournaments in Guilty Gear strive and Street Fighter V and of course plenty of casul matches. Thursday night is our Smash Bros. weekly with doubles starting at 6:30 and singles to follow at 7pm. Friday night is FIFA 22 at 7pm and Sunday is Rocket League at 1pm.
With all that outta the way, we can talk about the crazy weekend of esports we just witnessed. There were 4 major esports tournaments that took place this past weekend and thats just what I’m aware of. We had the Rocket League RLCS, Apex Legends ALGS Split 2 Playoffs, Halo Infinite HCS Kansas City Major, and the Valorant VCT Stage 2 qualifiers.
With a major Halo tournament taking place just 3 hours away in Kansas City, I was of course keeping a close eye on that event and it was a great tournament. The Halo Championship Series is being run by producers Esports Engine and they knocked it out of the park. From the stage, lighting, and open challenger bracket it was super cool to see another successful tournament take place in the midwest. Another cool thing about this tournament is that the cinderella Halo team since the release of Infinite has been the Kansas City Pioneers and they were the hometown team this tournament of course. The crowd really got behind them and they made a great run to finish top 6 which was awesome. They would have wanted a better finish but there are 4 Halo teams that seriously separated themselves from the rest of the competition. Eunited, OpTic Gaming, Cloud 9, and Sentinels are the 4 god squads of Halo right now. Eunited finished 4th, OpTic finished 3rd, and in a stunning return to championship status, the most accomplished roster in Halo history, Sentinels, defeated the current best team Cloud 9 in the grand finals. That’s just another trophy that Frosty, Royal2, Lethul, and Snakebite can add to their cabinet.
Moving on to the ALGS Split 2 playoffs now and let me just say, as a huge Apex Legends fan, this event was SOO fun to watch. I’m clearly biased since I like playing the game so much but the format that the ALGS uses for the competition I think is revolutionary when it comes to battle royale competition. So, 40 teams from all over the world qualified for this huge LAN tournament in Stockholm, Sweden. The first day of competition was on Friday and there were 4 groups of 10 teams. All the groups played 6 matches against each other and after Friday the top 20 teams qualified for the winner’s bracket and the bottom 20 moved to loser’s bracket. On Saturday the loser bracket 20 teams played 6 matches and the bottom 10 teams from those matches were eliminated from the tournament. Then the winner’s bracket 20 teams played and the top 10 team qualified for the Championship Sunday and the bottom 10 moved to loser’s finals to play other 10 teams from Loser’s. As you can guess, those 20 teams played and the top 10 moved on to Sunday and the bottom 10 went home. Ok, now that we finally got to championship Sunday we can finally talk about the coolest part of this format. On Championship Sunday, the top 20 teams play matches until teams get to 50 points earned from placement and kills. Once a team has 50 points they are on “match point” meaning that if they win the game then they win the event and go home as champions. So, in the instance of this event I believe 2-3 teams reached match point after 5 or 6 matches. Then in the 7th match Team Reignite who is a Japanese org but all three players hail from Austrailia, won match in a highly contested end circle of 3 teams. I know that’s a lot of info to take in but this format creates outrageously exciting scenarios and I think it’s really cool after awhile you will start to get a lot of teams on match point so anyone could win on any given match. If you ahven’t you’ll have to tune in to the next ALGS major tournament to check it out for yourself.
That’s going to do it for this week’s Tuesday Telecast, thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you next week!