Photo provided by Illinois State University
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The Grossinger Motors Arena hosted the Sixty-Six Games Tournament on October 21 and 22.
Sixty-Six Games is central Illinois’s largest sanctioned League of Legends Tournament
For a $8,000 prize, several university and college teams competed in a League of Legends tournament. The event also offered tabletop game tournaments for Magic The Gathering and Pokémon.
Illinois State University’s e-sports head coach Tj Bjorklund gives insight on how the Redbirds prepared for the tournament.
“Over the course of the entire semester, the team practices a lot of different stuff in-game and out-of-game,” he said. “The team participates in work-outs, they have mentality sessions.”
Bjorklund compared the Redbirds e-sports team’s practices to other sports. The team plays and practices similarly to traditional sport, an audience tunes in and watches similarly to traditional sports.
Coming from places all across the country, a few participating teams included University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Maryville University, Purdue Northwest and University of California San Diego.
The Redbirds ended in the consultation bracket.