*By Jimmy Mondal*
Will “wiill” Sims, in-game leader of the NobleGG team that recently qualified for the NPL preseason, started gaming as a League of Legends player in 2012. But his League of Legends skills didn’t foreshadow his later esports success.
“I was never personally that good,” he told Cheddar Sports with a laugh, “so I ended up just trying the coaching route.”
Sims continued to coach and manage League of Legends, he says, until Riot Games started to franchise out and he realized his chances of getting in without the connections or accolades that some of his peers possessed were slim.
At this point, he was looking for a game that was “accessible and something that you could get into early.” He realized that getting to a game late makes it harder to gain access to its inner circle and advance.
That’s when he discovered PUBG, right as it was first announced.
Sims jumped into the competitive scene in February, eventually playing in amateur 2v2 tournaments with some semi-professionals who happened to be missing team members for a full-on four-player squad.
After gaining experience through the amateur circuit and proving himself to the semi-professional community, he started to make connections to members of the NobleGG squad. However, Sims didn’t have the experience of some of the other players.
Although PUBG was his first first-person shooter game, Sims was able to prove his value by using the analytical and leadership skills he picked up while coaching League of Legends ー like “how to apply strategies, how to make a team work together, how to make people mesh.”
When coming to PUBG, he said he asked himself: “What other avenue can I approach to make myself valuable to the team? What can I offer?
“And it came down to the intellectual side of the game ーbeing able to use strategies, being able to adapt and think on the fly and being able to adjust to the situation,” he said adding, “which is what battle royale’s all about.”
Sims qualified with his team for the upcoming National PUBG League. Preseason starts in mid-January.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Monday, Jan. 7, 2019.
It's no secret that much of the popularity of Epic Games' smash hit Fortnite comes from its status as a free-to-play game. Now, Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter says two other surprising titles may make the switch: Overwatch and Call of Duty.
It's become par for the course for Epic Games to release game-changing items in Fortnite just before tournaments. Ghost Gaming's Kayuun shares his worries for what that means for competitive Fortnite.
In a sign of how attitudes around gambling have changed as laws around it have softened, the NFL announced its first-ever partnership with a gambling company, naming Caesars as the league's official casino sponsor. Chris Holdren, chief marketing officer for Caesars, told Cheddar that the sponsorship represents the beginning of a relationship that could eventually become one where the NFL is directly endorsing sports betting.
Bull riding isn't just for the rodeo, anymore. It's coming to a major city near you ー and streaming online ー thanks largely to the efforts of Colorado-based Professional Bull Riders (PBR). And PBR CEO Sean Gleason told Cheddarthe organization has plenty more tricks up its sleeve to keep its momentum going.
The markets opened up sharply higher on Friday after Thursday's big sell-off. The turnaround was due in large part to investor optimism over the upcoming U.S.-China trade talks but also the December jobs report. The U.S. economy added 314,000 jobs last month, topping the 184,000 jobs expected. Plus, Professional Bull Riders CEO Sean Gleason and bull rider Tanner Bryne stopped by to chat about growing bull riding in the U.S. in an ever-changing media landscape.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Friday, Jan. 4, 2019.
Fitness and beauty booking tool Mindbody is planning to make a play for the next big thing in wellness ー on-demand video, CEO Rick Stollmeyer told Cheddar on Thursday. "You can expect us to be playing in that space because we think that the on-demand and streaming video revolution hitting the fitness space is a big breakthrough," Stollmeyer said.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019.
