American expatriate Wolf Schroder has been living in Korea for the past six years. From the simple beginnings of a self-funded and self-ran weekly StarCraft tournament, the Open Wolf Cup, Wolf built his esports resume into something that was attractive enough to land him a gig with GOMtv casting GSL StarCraft. From there, Wolf has …
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics”. This quote, popularized by Mark Twain (albeit of unknown origin), is something to keep in mind whenever statistical analysis is consumed. While numbers can often point us in the right direction when properly used, they can just as easily mislead us into unreasonable …
Continue reading “Debunking False Narratives: A deep expedition into Echo Fox"e;s early game”
One of the most valuable things you can bring as a professional in any field is consistency. You don’t have to be the best, nor do you have to win on the biggest stage. You just have to show up. A brief quote from esports legend Sean “Day9” Plott sums this up nicely: “I’m not …
Continue reading “Silent Immortality: The Curious Case of Cop”
If you’re a fan of North America and a fan of League of Legends, you’ve heard the meme before — “LOL, NA Talent.” The argument has been pushed for years now that NA is lacking in good homegrown players. But players like eUnited’s Eric “Licorice” Ritchie are making a strong case against that thought. In …
Erberk “Gilius” Demir is following a long tradition of European Junglers who have left the EU LCS for North America. Surprisingly, however, is that he followed his Schalke teammate Hampus “Fox” Myhre to the NA Challenger Series and joined eUnited. Humble to a fault, Gilius and I chat about why he made the move to …
Part 1 _________ Phoenix1 P1 had a much different start to this split than they did last year. The first half the split, they have regularly been considered one of the top tier teams in the league. The same problem with constant roster issues did not affect them for the majority of this split; …
Continue reading “NA LCS: Unpredictable Trajectory (Part Two)”
With every season and split of the North American League Championship Series, we anticipate, speculate and expect. The seasons rarely pan out exactly as one believes that they will, even the most lauded analysts find themselves surprised by one team or another. There are the NA giants: Cloud9, Team SoloMid and Counter Logic Gaming. No matter how the …
Continue reading “NA LCS: Unpredictable Trajectory (Part One)”
Right before the LCS weekend, we got to catch a quick interview with FlyQuest's jungler, Galen "Moon" Holgate where he talks about the current jungle meta, international competition, SKT and KT, as well as this upcoming weekend. _____ Hey Moon, how are you and the team doing after the recent break? Was it impactful …
In two weeks, the four best teams of Hearthstone’s premier team league will fight to split $135,000. Team Liquid, Luminosity Gaming, Virtus.pro and compLexity have survived the seven-week culling and are headed for Burbank, March 16-18, leaving a lot of great teams to watch from the sidelines. And while there will always be times to …
It's easy to overhype LCS league leaders. The backlash from the franchise fans, combined with our own desire to be internationally dominant, often lead us into overinflated narratives. This, combined with how much harder it is to identify unpunished mistakes for analysts, builds opinions often detached from reality. Come Worlds, these judgments do not survive …