Survey: 42 Percent Of Esports Viewers Don't Play The Games They Watch

Not everyone who watches the Super Bowl plays football, and it turns out the same is true for the League of Legends World Championship. According to research done by analytics firm Newzoo, 42 percent of esports viewers surveyed do not actually play the games they watch.

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Kiev Major Concludes With Weird Montage Of Women; Production Company Later Deletes Video

Last weekend’s Kiev Major crowned OG as a four-time Majors winner and celebrated the CIS region’s Dota 2 history. After the closing ceremony, however, the last thing viewers saw was an unexplained montage of women simply watching the matches. Since then, that footage has been critiqued by some of the community for…

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TNC Is Rampaging Through Dota's Kiev Major

The four-month gap the Boston and Kiev Majors in Dota 2 has been especially vacuous, as precious few tournaments gave fans a chance to gauge each team’s potential headed into today’s Kiev Major group stage play. After Boston it seemed like TNC Pro Team was in disarray, but Kiev is showing that just might not be true.

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Who Are These 'New' Dota Teams At The Kiev Major?

The upcoming Kiev Major is one of the most important tournaments of the Dota season, a big tournament in its own right, and an important qualifier for the multi-million dollar The International, Dota’s equal part World Cup and Super Bowl. But if you haven’t been plugged into the Dota community for the last few months,…

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Dota Match Turns Into Five-Hour Melodrama

At about 11:00 p.m. local time a day ago, in the European West servers of Dota 2, 10 players queued up for an average, unranked match. Over the course of five hours, these players would rage, taunt, abandon, create new accounts, and become good friends. It was an odyssey of Dota matchmaking, a play in five acts, and…

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Dueling Dota 2 Pocket Picks Culminate In Bananas Comeback

The lower bracket seems like a strange place for a match-up like Evil Geniuses and Wings Gaming to happen, but in the first round of the Dota 2 Asia Championships bracket, both teams found themselves on their last leg in a best-of-one match. Back against the wall, both teams turned to oddball strategies, leading to…

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Meet The Student And Teacher Writing The Course For Dota 101

“I wanted a game that hated me.” That was how Sean Plott, also known as “Day9” in the professional gaming world, described the allure of Dota 2. Plott had made a name for himself in the days of StarCraft, where he taught players new and old how to better themselves at the strategy game. Now, he’s the student again,…

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American Dota 2 Team Moves To Southeast Asia For Qualifier, Loses Every Match

The regional qualifiers for the next Dota 2 major have been exciting, with over 100 matches played in the last 48 hours. The Kiev Major boasts a prize pool of $3 million, and so everybody and their grandmother has been competing to earn a spot, including one team that made a desperate move to somewhere in the…

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The Qualifiers For Dota 2's Kiev Major Have Been A Mess So Far

The qualifying system for Dota 2‘s majors has its roots in an egalitarian impulse where—theoretically—a team of amateurs could win an open and then regional qualifier, and find themselves competing in a major against professionals. But for the upcoming Kiev Major, that egalitarian has ran smack dab into the reality of…

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Pro Esports Team Analyst Caught Betting On His Own Team's Matches, Which Is Somehow Legal

Esports was rocked earlier this week when Ad Finem’s team analyst Allen Cook sent out a casual tweet saying that he’d placed bets on the outcome of the Boston Major Dota 2 tournament. Specifically, Cook bet on both his own team and another team, OG, because (he said) he believed that AF and OG were highly likely to…

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Physical Therapists Are Helping Esports Pros Play More And Hurt Less

Clacking keys; mashing buttons; running joysticks up and down in precise, intricate patterns. The motions of playing a video game are mechanical—frequent and repetitive—and suggest a machine at work, which is of course not far off, especially with the best players in the world routinely spending 12 hours a day playing…

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Dota 2 Team Accused Of Peeking At Match Stream, Which May Or May Not Be Cheating

An amateur Dota 2 team lost during the StarLadder FastCup this weekend when their wards—temporary items that provide crucial vision of the map—were picked off one-by-one, with alarming accuracy. The other team was not clairvoyant, but rather appeared to be getting outside information.

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Team Liquid Likely Secures Kiev Major Invite With StarLadder Victory

After missing December’s Boston Major and struggling the past few months to stay abreast of a tough European Dota 2 scene, it looked like Team Liquid might have to go through the gauntlet of European qualifying for the upcoming Kiev Major. Performing well at the StarLadder i-League StarSeries Season Three finals was…

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China's 2016 World Electronic Sports Games Were Lit

China has been building ghost cities, constructing man-made islands in the Pacific, and more recently diving head-first into the world of competitive gaming. When it comes to esports, the World Electronic Sports Games are entirely next level thanks to gigantic prize pools, unusual rules, and inconsistent live streams.

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