The Best of the South West! Well, almost.

Yesterday, Moose and I took part in the League of Legends 'Best of the South West' tournament, held at Bath University. It's the first of its kind in the UK and I'm so excited to have been a part of it. Hopefully the UK esports scene will only get larger and better now, with League's popularity growing every day.

Our team was made up of Moose, two friends from his computer science society Termisoc, one of their friends, and myself. We had a couple of practice sessions together as a team, but that was about it. As the event got closer, I started to worry that everybody else would be super serious and we'd be the only team made up of 'friends who kind of play the game'. As it turned out, the tournament actually had a really nice mix of both 'real' teams and folks just in it for a good time. I didn't think for one second that we'd win the whole event, even with Moose's skills to carry us, but I was pleasantly surprised when we won in our first bracket, taking us to round two and a guaranteed prize. We did extremely well that game, Moose went 12/1 I think and I went 3/0, which isn't as impressive, but the fact I didn't feed the other team any kills at all certainly means a lot to me! Garen and I (Brand) had a lot of fun laneswapping at the start when they decided to pull an AD Thresh out of nowhere. In the end I stuck mid against Kassadin. It was pretty great.

Sadly, our second game was not quite so successful. We were pitted against Bros In Suits, who completely annihilated us. They banned Soraka, our support's main champion, which didn't help matters, but frankly I don't think even Soraka could have saved the day. Their midlane was Kha'Zix, who I as Brand just couldn't touch, their Volibear jungle destroyed bot, where Moose tried his damndest but just couldn't carry us all, and their Cho' just chewed (dyswidt?) through our Garen like nobody's business.

I'd like to say we put up a bit of a fight, but we really never got the game going. We did provide their team with the day's only pentakill, so I suppose that's something! Right? Positive thinking! Yeah!

The whole event was streamed live, and they're in the process of editing the footage to put online later, including some interviews Moose did as team captain which had me sitting in the audience just bubbling with pride, seeing my boy up on stage all official-like. D'aw.

The day was amazing, really fun and so nice to see esports finally getting the look in on a smaller, more local scale. Hell, it's nice to see an event like this at all happening in England, so I'm definitely keeping my ear to the ground for news of more. There's rumour another will be held around November given how popular this tournament was. Anyway, here's some photos of the event thanks to Sarah who managed to snap a few while we were busy gaming!