Also since it’s summer holidays now, I’m trying not to let my brain fall asleep. Therefore, it’s my goal for the next month to post and comment on various areas of interest: including new gadgets, some stuff about gaming and of course science. Since this website won’t be strictly gaming any more, it probably doesn’t need an RSS feed on eSports Press but hopefully most of my readers will continue to enjoy the type of content i’ll be posting in the future.

Speaking of gaming, the last trip which I took was to DreamHack Summer in Jönköping a few weeks ago. It was fantastic to see all the old Quakers from over the years, as well as new friends too! Above you can see Videl (g0d’s latest addition) and I a little upset over the drinks situation at the LAN. We were just having a bit of fun ^^. It was a really nice idea that Telia had, where you could create your own “fan sign” for your favourite player at DreamHack.

QuakeCon is just around the corner and I wish I could go there also but sponsorship in Quake is pretty scarce right now, where even top players like Strenx and Spart1e have to seek out sponsorship (In case you missed it, they left fnatic). Thus, Quake is pretty dead in the sponsor department so I can’t make it to QuakeCon but certainly I’ll be watching and cheering from home, especially for the TDM players!

You can view a quick preview of the upcomig games below:

To see who else ESL has recruited for commentating for the event:

For those of you who have been complaining about poor quality streams, ESL.tv will be broadcasting in HD, so make sure to get premium! Why didn’t they offer this when Joe went shirtless?! (haha )
If you can’t order premium, ESFI world are giving away 10 premium subscriptions! Click here for the details.

Hope to see you in Hannover! yey!!!

One day, he let his mother watch the 100th episode and from that, she decided to write an article about it.

As I listened to Sean, and as I watched my son game, it was always clear to me that the label of gamer was highly deficient. These kids are students of life. They are practicing life in a highly evolved and fast-paced world. Real life moves too slow mostly because of the ridiculous beliefs that the adults in their life call rules and reality. Sean described the skill set of a pro gamer as having the “mind of a chess master and the dexterity of a musician.” Now where can they learn that in school—maybe practicing their cursive writing, a completely obsolete skill, or learning the beginning and ending dates of some ridiculous war that people had no business fighting anyway. Most modern education is about memorizing and passing tests. It is about creating conformists that blindly obey authority figures. Sean jokes that it is a world of “all A’s for everyone.” But the gaming world is real and fair. You don’t win because your mother has connections. You don’t lose because a judge made some biased decision. You don’t get respect because you are older or have an advanced degree. You get respect because you won. And, you won because you deserved to win.

The whole article is totally awesome. Click here to read it now!

Team Sweden at the ENC Finals in Cologne, 2010

Excerpt:

You have already played tournament favourite 4K in the EC and lost by only a few frags on both Maps. Did you expect the match to be so close? And did this result give you confidence or frustration?
purri: I was very frustrated afterwards. It felt like such a waste from our side. I claim that our inexperience (How can you call a team inexperienced when we have more than 40 years of TDM in our lineup!!) did cost us the game. What I mean is that this particular game felt like ours to win, and to take. In particular the 2nd map where it felt that we were controlling the tempo and items/quad from start until last 2 quads. I think we were worthy to play a 3rd map. However we did not, and 4K won fair and square! I have to say they are a good team, and their caliber will never be easy to beat no matter what lineup you have! There is some good news though. I don’t know from 4K’s side, but I know for sure we could have had a better lineup and we have practised a lot since then. So they will have to play better next game to win, since we will and I’m looking forward to it myself already! Bring it plz!

Damiah: To be honest before the game I didnt expect much, but after the game I thought that we should have won it. Even that we were underdogs before the match it was really annoying to lose it like that ?
I think we have really good potential if we are just able to use it.

To enjoy the rest of the interview, click here.

It’s been a long and exciting journey and after seven weeks of travelling, blogging and crossing Europe we have reached the conclusion of the Alienware Backpacking Challenge. The time has come to announce the winner. Who will walk away with $5,000 and an Alienware M11x?

MEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!

I’m so fucking happy!

But to get to the real reason i’m posting this blog, it’s not to post news that I won (since most of you probably saw the spam on facebook anyway) but because I have been reading the comments on the other websites about it. People don’t seem to be very happy for me.

Just to let you all know, I actually came THIRD in the public poll. So to everyone who says that people just voted for me because i’m a girl (followed by “I don’t understand why because she’s so ugly anyway”), they actually didn’t vote as much as you think.

While people were all saying that I had an unfair advantage to start with (by being female) I actually felt like I was at a disadvantage. People were rooting against me to start off with BECAUSE I was female. I only had the support of my close friends in the beginning and I feel like I had to work TWICE as hard to win over the general public just to show that I am capable of being more than just… a female face.

I am happy that I still won even if I did come third in the final poll because it shows that Alienware was happy with my performance. This means that there was some kind of judgement and moderation of all the work done over the past 8 weeks and I was found to be the best. That’s the bottom line!

Alienware Challenge website

Without further ado, here are the interviews.

Fazz:

Justin Wong:

Rapha:

He wrote in his blog:

Savior, anytime, luxury, and many other progamers have been caught 100% proven cheating. Being arrested and taken to court no joke.

Their ‘slumps’ happened because betting sites/rings paid them 10-20k at times to throw games and they finally got caught.

The korean esports world is handling it as quietly as possible so that the industry isn’t harmed by the news which is why you merely only see rumors floating around, but they are no rumors.

He then followed up with a couple of video blogs listing his “known” offenders. The videos have since been removed by the author, but apparently he drunkenly openly speaks about the mischief amongst the top players. He mentioned that savior had made around $2,000,000 betting against himself. He also mentions on average each player would receive about $4500 from throwing each game. Retired pro-gamers, coaches and a commentator are also said to be involved.

While many people are disgusted by what has come about, we all must remember that illegal gambling and match rigging is nothing new in competitive sports. If we replaced the game of StarCraft with the game of Quake, I can guarantee the exact same thing would happen. Also I really don’t think that this will be the beginning of the death of StarCraft, as many sports which are notorious for match-rigging are still popular (one pro-gamer has even admitted to throwing a game and people still are huge fans of them).

It seems that when there is a mixture of money and sport, there is the temptation to influence the outcome unfairly. This has been going on since “forever”, as it is reported that the Ancient Olympics were almost constantly dealing with allegations of athletes accepting bribes to lose a competition and city-states which often tried to manipulate the outcome with large amounts of money.

Click here to watch the drama unfold on TeamLiquid (with the first post being updated with new developments).

The official WCG Ultimate Gamer casting dates and locations are as follows:

• April 7– Los Angeles
Radisson Hotel Los Angeles Westside, 6161 West Centinela Ave., Culver City
9:00 am– 6:00 pm

• April 10– New York
Samsung Experience, Time Warner Center, 10 Columbus Circle, New York
9:30 am– 6:00 pm

• April 10– Chicago
Inn of Chicago Magnificent Mile, 162 E. Ohio Street., Chicago
9:00 am– 6:00 pm

• April 10– Atlanta
Atlanta Marriot Perimeter Center, 246 Perimeter Center Parkway Northwest, Atlanta
9:00 am– 6:00 pm

Word on the street is that they’re especially looking for female gamers who “are up to showing the world that they are best”. Click here for the full details.

Tonya Welch has been a part of many huge professional gaming organizations such as the CPL, CGS and WSVG. Finally, out of eSports, she has decided to come clean about the “new” CPL and the lies that were crafted around it.

All of this led up the the first outright lie that was propagated regarding the purchase of the CPL. There was NEVER a middle-eastern investment group from Abu Dhabi behind the purchase of the CPL. It was 100%, from beginning to end, a complete LIE, with every intention to deceive the owners of the CPL brand (at least, the other three partners were told the owners were included in this lie), the gamers, the potential investors, and the people at CGS.

She has written a long blog on Complexity Gaming outlining the beginning of the “new” CPL, and promises to write more before disappearing. Will we hear even more secrets?

This blog is WELL worth the read! What do you think about the deception?

To enter all you have to do is upload your frag to youtube and post it as a video response to the above video before March 31 2010. Quite simple! If you’re not sure how to capture your demos as a .avi, you can use an easy program called fraps (for PC only, sorry I have no idea how to capture from console!). I hope to see some great oldschool UT frags there! Nothing like a monster kill with a well-placed shock combo!

Rules:

Closing Date: March 31st
Prize: Fatal1ty Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium Sound Card and the Fatal1ty Gaming Headset Mk II
Submit video as a response here
Any platform is acceptable
One entry per person
No obscenities

Good luck everyone!