Halo Championship Series Pro League NA

The Halo Championship Series: Pro League has been running for 3 weeks now, but what’s going on? If you want to get involved with the exciting world of Halo e-sports but don’t know where to start then you have come to the right place.

The Halo franchise has always had a strong presence in competitive gaming even before e-Sports became the billion dollar industry it is today hosting several high profile tournaments over the years. The release of Halo 5 brought fresh life to competitive Halo as it had been intended from the start of production that this game would be geared towards e-Sports. The game launched at the end of October and by November what would become the largest e-Sports event in console gaming history was underway. Regional qualifiers began online with a rotation of 4 vs 4 Slayer and Objective games and anyone that owned a copy of the game was able to participate, but soon the skill gap became apparent as the high profile professional gamers came out on top. Each of the 5 regions hosted a series of tournaments leading up to their respective finals with the winning teams each receiving $50,000 and automatic entry into the Halo World Championship (Not bad for playing your Xbox!).

The tournament was made up of 16 teams from around the world with 343industries selecting the 11 best preforming teams of the regionals to make up the numbers. The prize pool for this tournament was initially announced to be $1,000,000 plus the total sum of all micro-transactions in Halo 5 (unlike EA– who use their Micro-transactions to fund their children’s soul harvesting addiction). Unbelievably the total prize fund by the time of the tournament was a staggering $2,500,000! with the winners taking a cool $1,000,000 all for themselves! Now this doesn’t quite match up to the God-like numbers DOTA 2 is throwing at there pro gamers but it certainly puts this tournament in the top 5 e-Sports prize pools of all time, and is more than double anything else in console gaming. (We’re talking 18M for DOTA…No seriously, 18M…18). In March of this year the tournament got underway and as much as I’d love to tell you about every last frag kill, beat down and no scope we seen that week this is not the time. Eventually after a close tournament Counter Logic Gaming came out on top after defeating Team Allegiance 4-0 in a best of 7 final.

Now the popularity of this tournament led 343 to creating their first Pro League, evolving their Halo Championship Series which had previously consisted of only tournaments, into a weekly match day event. There are currently two Pro Leagues, one in Europe and one in North America, unsurprisingly it is the NA league that gets most of the publicity which is justifiable as it does boast the best teams and individuals, I will however cover the EU Pro League in another article.

The NA Pro League consists of 8 teams which I will expand on in the coming weeks, These teams are:

Counter Logic Gaming (CLG)

Evil Geniuses (EG)

Enigma 6 (E6)

Team Allegiance (TA)

L.A Renegades (LAR)

Team Envious (TE)

Team Liquid (TL)

Optic Gaming (OG)

Each week there are two match days on Thursday and Friday at 5pm (PT) each day with 4 matches best 3 of 5, on average taking up around 2.5 hours of your time, of course you can always pick a team and just tune in for their games, as one match only lasts between 30 and 50 minutes. For more information on Halo e-Sports head over to Halo.gg. But be sure to come back for an in-depth look at each team and player currently active in the Pro League.

Happy Gaming.