The classic e-sport is as popular as ever

Every gamer has memories of Counter-Strike, whether it’s the classic 1.3, the short-lived Source era, or the souped-up and brand new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. As a competitive first-person shooter, Counter-Strikewas one of the first-ever truly ubiquitous e-sports and it’s still extremely popular today. In fact, it’s so popular that three large tournaments are happening this month. If you’d like to catch up on the scene (i.e., CS:GO tournaments and CS:GO teams), here's what to look out for:

Asus ROG Masters

The Republic of Gamers is a PC performance hardware retailer with a big hand in Southeast Asian e-sports through their annual ROG Masters tournaments. These are huge, international tournaments, recently for both CS:GO and Dota 2, with hundreds of teams competing at the local level. Several dozen Philippine CS:GO teams fought in local online qualifiers last September. Sadly, out of 11 Philippine teams that qualified for the Southeast Asian leg, only Anonymous made it past the group stages and were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. That isn’t to say the hype is over yet however, as even without a home team to cheer on, fans of the e-sport will be tuning in on November 12 to 13 for the tournament’s Grand Finals in Malaysia, which will feature Singaporean team Leapfrog versus Vietnamese team Sabertooth.

WESG 2016

The World Electronic Sports Games is one of the biggest cross-game world championships currently. The tournament features CS:GO, DOTA 2, StarCraft and Hearthstone, with each game having large regional qualifiers for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, North and South Americas, Africa, Middle East, India and Southeast Asian regions. Just from that list alone you can tell how big this tournament is. Again, sadly, the best bets of the country in teams Mineski – CS:GO, 5peaks and Anonymous among others did not make it far into the SEAn qualifiers. The playoffs for each regional qualifiers just concluded this month, and the winning teams from each region will compete in the World Championships in November. The tournament will conclude on November 12, so if you’re planning to catch at the very least the epic finals game, you know what day to stream the tournament.

Tournaments Past

Apart from those two large CS:GO tournaments to look forward to this November, several other smaller (but still premier) tournaments just concluded this month. The current top team in the country, Mineski – CS:GO, qualified for both the IeSF World Championships and the Mr. Cat Invitational, validating their spot as one of the recognized best teams in Southeast Asia. They did, however, not do well, despite their domination of the local scene.

On the other hand, the MPGL Season 8 Grand Finals just finished this weekend, with 1nconsistent defeating Mineski – CS:GO in a clutch 5th game. The Spring and Summer Legs decided the top 6 teams in the country. These are the Alpha Dogs (previously 5peaks), 1nconsistent, Expendables, G1 Wolves, Imperium Pro Team, Mineski – CS:GO and they competed last October 28 to 30 at the E-sports and Gaming Summit at the SMX center in MoA.

Perhaps we still have a hope on the international stage because the champions, team 1nconsistent, will get to go to Taiwan to compete in WirForce 2016. Now if only the team of students can manage to get their VISAs in time for the event, which is on November 10.