[2023] Champions LA Was Amazing

Hey guys,

I hardly ever post on reddit (mostly comment) but I feel like I’d be doing a disservice to everyone if I didn’t share this.

To start I’m a 30M and have gamed all my life but never played PC. Val was my first PC tac shooter (and only only shooter I’ve played other than overwatch.)

I started out in iron when the game launched and have peaked at diamond so I’m not good by any means, but I basically had to give my 100% to get to diamond. Aim trained, learned macro; learned all the roles, practice movement, learned how to comm effectively, ult management, how to control areas, manage Econ etc. I mostly did this by watching videos of streamers and tutorials and didn’t even realize something like serious pro play existed for these games until about a year in.

Since then I got sucked into being a 100 thieves fan by watching Hiko pretty religiously and then started watching Tarik when he started streaming a lot . VCT became easily my favorite thing to watch even over NFL/NBA etc.

I’ve had a blast following the tier 2 scene and franchising and whenever they announced the finals would be in LA I realized I had to go see this live. I live in the Midwest so it was a pretty big commitment to get out there.

I hit up one of my buddies from high school who used to play CS/Halo (he’s never played val) who lives in LA and asked him if he’d want to go (he’s 31) with no hesitation he was in. We snagged 2 tickets to the finals.

HOLY sh*t, my expectations were high and it still blew my expectations out of the water. The arena, the production, the quality of teams, the stories, the merch I had no idea so many people were into this, it was easily one of the coolest things I’ve ever been to. I was a little nervous my buddy wouldn’t like it that much given he had almost no context but he loved it maybe even more than I did. He’s already downloaded valorant and gotten the bundle (and he’s already pretty much as good as I am).

I’m definitely going to go to as many of these that I can and try to bake them into vacations.

Shout out to Riot that event made me feel all giddy like I was 15 again watching NBA games and just being in awe at how talented everyone is in this sport. This is what games are all about, all ages, all types of people, all regions having great competition, great banter and most of all just having fun.

Thank you to Riot and to everyone else involved for giving me one of the best experiences of my life, my only regret is that I didn’t get to the merch store fast enough so had to get a small hoodie (that doesn’t fit) but just gonna hang it up in my gaming room.