Since August 4th, Aussies have been competing with 35 other countries in CS:GO, Hearthstone, and League of Legends in the Australian International eSports Federation World Championship Qualifiers, and the time has come to crown some champs. The climax of the event will be the Grand Final of the Counter-Strike tourney, which will be broadcasted on SBS 2 on September 2nd.
Big news for competitive Counter-Strike.
The actual Grand Final will be held in Jakarta, Indonesia, but you can tune into SBS 2 at 9:30pm on the night to see host Madeleine Rose and commentators Danny Kim and Darren Kwan cast the event as Aussie teams SYF Gaming and Athletico will take each other on in a best of three series. The victor will represent Australia at the World Championships, and take the majority spoils of a $13,200 prize pool.
If you’re like me and the TV is more of an antiquated decoration item for your living room, you can watch the event on Twitch instead at the Australian eSports League’s channel.
It’s not quite the first time a clan war has been broadcast on free-to-air – I claimed that honour in the very first episode of Good Game (neener neener) – but since that was a friendly, this is the first free-to-air Counter-Strike match that matters. It also represents SBS taking an important step into the wide world of eSports — and given the decent quality of its other sports programs like The World Game, it would be amazing if it gave a small fraction of that support to eSports. I’m allowing myself to dream.
One day…
Comments
2 responses to “SBS 2 To Broadcast Australian Counter-Strike GO Showdown Live”
Hey, why did they leave National out of the acron…oh…..
Oh my….
Nice for SBS to do us a solid after Amazon intentionally broke twitch streaming through chromecasts (stutter).