This week embarks on a rather intriguing and brilliant time for those involved in UK eSports and it’s events. Dreamhack London of course kicks off a period unique to the UK Scene which sees four events featuring CS:GO and one event featuring LoL in the space of 7 – 8 weeks.
What I wanted to do was help keep everyone in the loop with regards to what is actually happening in the UK Scene and so I’ll give a rundown of all the events and what teams are anticipated to be there. It’s a great time for those yearning for eSports events to come to the UK, and it’d be great if people could rally behind all of these events over the coming weeks to help make a statement to the world, that the UK is ready for these big scale events to take place.
Dates: 19th – 20th September
Venue: Copperbox Arena
Location: London
Tickets: Click Here
Prize Money: $40,000
Announced a few months ago, everyone in the UK CS:GO scene has kept an eye on what it meant for UK teams in general, would it be DH’s first foray into the UK scene with a proper BYOC event which could in theory be better than the UK’s own version of DH, iSeries? Would it bring big prize money to the UK Scene? Would it bring international teams to the UK? These questions were all of course answered through the fact that it was an invitational event part of Dreamhack’s long running “Open Circuit” which sees places like Stockholm, Valencia, Bucharest used to great effect, and of course, their circuit is expanding year on year, going to new places like London, Moscow, Austin in the next year.
They announced qualifiers with 2 slots being given to European teams, whilst the third slot would be given solely to the UK, a fantastic chance for UK teams to showcase their skill to the world, and do it against some solid teams too.
With this event being held at the Copperbox Arena (which was used by Gfinity for G3 in 2014), it will be interesting to see how well Dreamhack can do with the venue considering some of the issues that Gfinity encountered over their weekend.
Teams:
Team SoloMid
Team Dignitas
Team EnVyUs
Renegades
G2.Kinguin
EZSKINS (UK Qualifier)
SK Gaming (EU Qualifier)
Copenhagen Wolves (EU Qualifier)
Talent Lineup:
Richard Lewis – Panel Host
Pala “Mantrousse” Gilroy Sen – Interviewer
Duncan “Thorin” Shields – Expert
Matthew “Sadokist” Trivett – Commentator
Henry “HenryG” Greer – Commentator
Anders Blume – Commentator
Auguste “Semmler” Massonnat – Commentator
Dates: 24th – 27th September
Venue: National Exhibition Centre
Location: Birmingham
Tickets: Click Here
Prize Money: $100,000
Held at EGX (formerly known as Eurogamer) which is a gaming festival, see’s Gfinity bring the cancelled CS:GO event from the Summer (due to ESL One Cologne being close) to a bigger arena, where there is a possibility of over 60,000 – 80,000 people flocking to EGX over the course of the weekend. What we do know, is there will be European teams, however we were expected to see the two UK teams, Team Infused & EZSKINS go head to head for a share of £5,000 at EGX too in the “UK Championship”. It has been confirmed by both sets of players that the finals of that have been pushed back to a later date.
This will be an exciting prospect over the weekend as four of the World’s best teams will go head to head for a share of the prize pool on offer. It can only mean great things for the teams in attendance and for those who will be watching there live.
Once again, it seems that Gfinity are quite keen on promoting UK talent for their casting line up with James “BanKs” Banks, Henry “HenryG” Greer, Karam “Kyan1te” Kabbara, Matt “Chewwy” Smith & Duncan “Thorin” Shields all there helping bolster a star studded lineup.
Teams:
fnatic
Ninjas in Pyjamas
Team EnVyUs
Virtus.Pro
Talent Lineup:
Martin Wyatt – Stage Host
James “BanKs” Banks – Interviewer
Jared “Lycan” Williams – Analysis Desk Host
Toby “TobiWan” Dawson – Commentator
Henry “HenryG” Greer – Commentator
Karam “Kyan1te” Kabbara – Commentator
Matt “Chewwy” Smith – Commentator
Duncan “Thorin” Shields – Analyst
Dates: 1st – 4th October
Venue: Kettering Conference Centre
Location: Kettering
Tickets: Click Here
Prize Money: Up to £3,000
This is the usual LAN event that happens in the UK, of course though, this is the first time in four years that epic.LAN has hosted a third event in a calendar year, with the last one being held at epic.SEVEN at Uttoxeter Racecourse in the October of 2011. That event was won by LiNK Gaming led by Luke “KritikaL” Green. It is an incredible thing that it’s taken four years for epic.LAN to be confident in hosting another October event which means the growth the LAN has achieved in that time since the move to Kettering in 2013 has been great to see.
Clean LAN prior to opening
epic.LAN is an open event, open for all skill levels and all players, with the last one being in July, it was the biggest CS:GO turnout we’ve seen at an epic.LAN and matched epic.FIVE’s record for CS. Still a long way off from beating CoD4’s record of 22 teams in a single tournament. This epic.LAN (epic.SIXTEEN) will be coined as a smaller event, due to it being their first event in October for four years, it’s better to aim low and achieve more than aiming high and delivering poorly. It also gives epic.LAN to trial different games in preparation for next year’s LAN circuit after dropping League of Legends, it has now picked up both Rocket League & Super Smash Bros as “fun tournaments” with the aim of introducing them into next year.
Over the course of epic.FIFTEEN, the CS:GO stream reached over 98,600 unique viewers and achieved some really positive growth, with peak concurrent viewers at 9,062 for the finals. Of course Choke Gaming won 3:2 over CAZ eSports, and took home their first LAN title.
Teams:
Choke Gaming
East x West
Team Ascalon
LEAVEITYEAH
Team Infused
fish123
Molotovs n Marshmallows
Talent Lineup:
TBA at a later stage
Dates: 23rd – 25th October
Venue: ExCeL Centre
Location: London
Tickets: Click Here
Prize Money: £5,000 (£10,000)
ESL UK Premiership finals are at the end of October, being held at MCM ComicCon in London. Of course the last finals were also held there in May, and it seemed to reap the rewards, with CS:GO solely going to be at MCM, no LoL this time, just the CS:GO finals, which means the four teams have more time to play with. In May, there was over 500k unique viewers that watched the stream across the weekend, and nearly 25k on peak concurrent viewers, not to mention that the seats were full all weekend at the stage. It really was wonderful to watch. This time, there will be four teams advancing from the group stage which is still ongoing.
The Stage at UK Premiership finals in May
If you want to know which teams will make it through to the finals, then each Monday evening for the next three weeks will give you the answers you desire, or make sure you check out my Midseason review I did last week of the ESL UK Premiership.
This is ultimately the biggest UK only competition we’ve had for quite some time, with £5k being put towards the LAN finals and £5k for all of the online stuff (Promotions & Group Games etc).
Teams:
TBD by September 28th
Talent Lineup:
TBA at a later stage
The whole purpose of this article is to keep everyone informed, but also most importantly to rally people into action into supporting all the upcoming events, if these events prove incredibly successful over the next few weeks, then we could finally see events such as IEM, ESL One, and other notable events hit our shores and that could be a massive boost to the UK Scene as a whole, and help grow and nurture eSports in the continued direction.
It should also be noted (even though we are a UK CS:GO website) that Worlds London also takes place at Wembley Arena which will feature the Quarter Finals of League of Legends biggest tournament of the year head to our shores. That is dated on October 15th – 18th and should bolster an impressive crowd if it’s anything like last years Wembley stop for EU LCS.
If you are attending any of these events, please let us know in the comments below!
