Unless you’re not concerned with American politics or do an excellent job of avoiding it, it’s probably all you’re seeing anywhere. While it’s good to stay informed on current events, it usually gets taxing when you hear and see a lot of the negativity portrayed in the media. Of course, they are only reliable to a certain extent, as they don’t report on everything going on in the world and obviously include any degree of bias, no matter where you get your news from. Point being, it can be a headache to keep up with this, that and the other going on, especially when good news seems to show up once in a blue moon. So, what I’ve personally been doing is keeping up with eSports; specifically the CS:GO ELeague Major 2017.

While not everyone is interested in video games, let alone competitive gaming, I’m hoping that this will be refreshing to at least one person’s timeline. In short, eSports is simply competitive video game tournaments. While it’s certainly not nearly as physical as actual sports, eSports still provides professional competition with a variety of teams all over the globe, and obviously involves a variety of games. From MOBAs to shooters to strategy games and even card games are held on a competitive level and have recently gotten more attention as its growth has only risen over the years. It personally makes me excited to see that games that I personally love are being broadcasted and treated with serious competition to enjoy with growing fanbases. This week, I decided to keep up with the CS:GO ELeague Major—even though CWL qualifiers for Call of Duty were also going on at the same time.

From Denmark, France, North America, the Netherlands, and even Russia, we had 16 incredible teams compete in this years ELeague Major 2017, held in Atlanta Georgia. From the start of the competition on Sunday, January 22^nd, we had a load of intense competitive CS:GO matches being held, with hundreds of thousands of fans watching the livestream—this doesn’t even include the amount watching the game right at the venue. Playing out of a prize pool of $1 million, the teams from the ESL One 2016 tournament and the newcomers from the Offline Qualifier have fought every single match down to the wire of every single round. Every match was a Best of 1, since every game they played was a best out of 16 rounds—most of which went into OT.

There were certainly high hopes for newcomers, OpTic Nation, as their main stage lies with Call of Duty and have had a strong Halo team in the past. However, they fell short after losing 3 games over the course of this week. In addition, one of the main assets that led to Gambit eSports’ rise to the top 8 was their pick for Zeus onto their team. After ESL One 2016, there were more than a few tradeoffs of players held between teams and Zeus was a very important pivot on their team, providing them with support needed to secure their second match against Godsent and their last match (as of date) against FaZe. Speaking of which, FaZe are a relatively new team to come into CS:GO, as their main game is also set in Call of Duty. But having acquired a team just a little over a year ago, they have established themselves very soundly into the community, having made Top 8 in this particular event.

As runner-ups to Grand Finals at ESL One 2016, I was personally surprised that Team Liquid fell shy of the Top 8. On top of which, I was disappointed that my favorite team, Team EnVyUs was also so close to Top 8 of this event, barely losing to FaZe 16-11 just 2 days ago. However, I’m sure that not only will this event still continue strongly with the remaining contenders, but that we’ll have more to come from all of the teams in future events. For anyone still interested, the event isn’t over yet, as we have the quarter, semi and Grand Finals still to be held over next week. Either watch in-game on GOTV, if you have the game. Otherwise, you can watch on twitch.tv or youtube.com.