By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
As UNLV’s basketball team battled the Nevada squad from Reno in the Mountain West hoops tourney Thursday, David Lee was making sure a different type of competition would be ready to go at Thomas & Mack Center.
In only a few hours, UNLV’s eSports team would be taking on its Boise State eSports counterparts in an exhibition match from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Thomas & Mack.
Welcome to the eSports world in the Las Vegas market, fast becoming an eSports co-leader with Los Angeles. The Las Vegas eSports market has seen MGM Resorts International convert a former nightclub into an eSports venue at the Luxor, while the eSports Las Vegas-based Rogue team has been capturing national attention. There’s even a downtown Las Vegas eSports theater in the Neonopolis development along Fremont Street Experience.
Las Vegas-based ESP Gaming is producing the free eSports exhibition matches Thursday and Friday in a Thomas & Mack event room called the Strip View Pavilion, plus a paid admission event in the connected Cox Pavilion Saturday. The Mountain West eSports Showdown, as this week’s competitions are being billed, is the first event of its type for the Colorado Springs-based sports conference.
“ESP is a big supporter of collegiate eSports,” said Lee, a former New York securities litigation lawyer who is vice president of operations for ESP Gaming. “We want to drive the maturation of eSports.”
The arena’s event space at Strip View Pavilion that includes displays for Mountain West Conference tourney sponsors carved out an eSports area for two groups of computer screens and chairs. Caesars Entertainment donated the use of the screens and chairs.
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And there’s even a video set for hosts and a video board near the competitors’ long table. And the video screen on the host set even includes the logos of the Mountain West tourney sponsors such as UMC, Hilton, Port of Subs and Valley Bank of Nevada.
ESP Gaming is working on a formal relationship with UNLV to have two or three interns work for the company over the summer as part of an accredited academic program with the university’s International Gaming Institute. LVsportsBiz.com did a story on UNLV’s eSports work led by Robert Rippee, director of the Hospitality Lab at the gaming institute.
The UNLV and Boise State squads will compete against each other in three popular video games — Overwatch, where teams try to capture a control point; Rocket League, where teams play soccer with cars; and the popular League of Legends, where teams try to capture an opponent’s base.
While the video games don’t look like athletic sports events, the competitions are making in-roads into the mainstream sports world.
For example, X Sports Aspen included eSports and the Summer Olympics is considering including eSports as a sport, said Chelsea Maag, an assistant commissioner for a soon-to-be-released initiative at ESP Gaming.
For Saturday’s 9 a.m. paid competition event in Cox Pavilion, you can buy tickets here through UNLV Tickets.
And for more eSports info during this week’s Mountain West Conference basketball tourney, you can click here.
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