Forget Football on Sunday, I’m watching Starcraft on Saturday

I think I’m getting more and more into eSports by the week. Now on a Saturday morning I find myself going to Twitch and seeing what’s on, and usually watching some kind of tournament, often of a game that I don’t quite completely know or understand yet, but I still find it incredibly engaging.

One of the first strategy games to capture my attention was Warcraft II and after that Starcraft so I was pretty excited to find out that the Starcraft II World Championships were going on in Montreal today. When I first logged-onto Twitch there was a countdown timer with about 12 minutes left.

After the countdown timer finished, like most sporting events, announcers popped onto the screen and started covering the competitors, standings and games ahead for the day.

It’s pretty interesting, the players are profiled a lot like athletes are before a major championship game. The announcers even compared today’s tournament to the energy and excitement that comes before a major football game. As the players took their positions in front of their computers the competition began and when the camera pulled back panning across the crowd you could really feel the intensity.

Lucky for me, Starcraft II not surprisingly is pretty darn similar to Starcraft which is a game that I knew and loved a long time ago so the longer I watched the more the dynamics of the game came back to me. Without the announcers I’m not sure I would have been as sucked into the action but with play-by-play coverage I was soon at the edge of my seat (or bed in this case since I was still not officially up yet) waiting to see who would win.

At this point, since I don’t know any of the gamers I don’t necessarily care too much who wins but I could see myself getting a lot more excited if a player that I knew and had been following for years took the stage. This is why everyone in the audience is literally at the edge of their seat as the games neared the end and droves of aliens stormed giant pod-like bases on opposite ends of the screen.

The Starcraft World Championships is broken down into two three different stages, in each stage players compete to win by playing three different maps, the best of the three moves onto the next stage. If you want to tune in yourself just head over to Twitch.tv, it’s free to watch and from what I can tell we’re in Group Stage 2 (someone correct me if I’m wrong here) so there’s still plenty of action ahead!