Hollywood Hammers aim to qualify for NA Overwatch Contenders from TaKeOver 2

Hammers as an organisation have been involved in Overwatch since August 2016. They’ve made intelligent decisions to build up promising, successful teams, acquiring -bird noises- and then The Chavs to compete at the top of both North American and European scenes.

Hammers announced a major partnership earlier this month with TCL Chinese Theatre to form “Hollywood Esports”, and rebranded themselves to Hollywood Hammers. Their aim is to become Los Angeles’ “home town team” for esports by utilising the substantial resources of the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

The partnership will involve Hollywood Hammers’ European Overwatch players moving out to Los Angeles and playing from the TCL Chinese Theatre as their office each day, following teams such as EnVyUs and Rogue in their move to the US.

The founder and CEO of Hammers Esports, King “KIMA” Perez De Tagle, spoke on the announcement saying:

The Hammers organization looks to lead the trend of esports teams being more accessible and connected to local fans. Our affiliation with the TCL Chinese Theatre, an incredible Los Angeles landmark, and the creation of Hollywood Esports bridges the gap between our global fans and gamers of all kinds. As the Hollywood Hammers, our teams welcome other competing esports teams to challenge us in our home arena. Concurrently, Hollywood Esports will work closely with the TCL Chinese Theatre to develop multiple esports content strategies with the production of tournaments, game launches and events.

An interesting sentence within his statement indicates that TCL Chinese Theatre will serve as more than simply the office for Hollywood Hammers. The landmark theatre is an enormous, grand building with infrastructure in place to house crowds already; Hollywood Esports intends to utilise the TCL Chinese Theatre as a home arena.

As well as being used for tournaments - with Hammers perhaps looking to use TCL Chinese Theatre as their “stadium” for OWL home games - the theatre will also host events with local universities and gamers to integrate the local fanbase.

The official announcement also states that the TCL Chinese Theatre will be fully equipped for use as a broadcast studio to allow live streaming of events. Hollywood Esports will create and manage a network of these theatres across the United States to provide tournament organisers with the facilities to run major tournaments.

For those unfamiliar with the theatre, this partnership may not seem too dramatic. There have been no details announced of how the partnership involves the bulky resources of enormous Chinese company TCL. The TCL Chinese Theatre is a massive asset to the organisation though and has name and resource value in itself.

“The theatre is crazy big,” said Hammers tank ChrisTFer, “it’s insanely famous, a lot of huge movies regularly do movie premiers there. Its also a historic landmark. I’m pretty sure the attacking spawn in Hollywood is based on the theatre. It still hasn’t sunk in how crazy it will be to work there every day.”

It’s not all smooth sailing for Hollywood Hammers though.

The Overwatch team are planning to move to North America just as Blizzard has announced their development league: Overwatch Contenders, and they have also accepted an invite to compete at the $50,000 TaKeOver 2 LAN. This move puts them in a particularly unfortunate situation; they will be playing a major LAN in Germany while the North American Overwatch Contenders qualifiers are running, and then Hammers will be moving as the European Overwatch Contenders qualifiers begin. Even if they delay their flights, Hammers would only be able to qualify for the European online Season Zero.

Blizzard attempted to mitigate any issues with booking both TaKeOver 2 and the North American Overwatch Contenders qualifiers on June 3rd and 4th. Cloud9 and Rogue both have byes through that stage of the tournament due to the conflicting schedule and their legacy as top teams. Hollywood Hammers were not in talks with Blizzard and both parties were simply unaware of the others situation.

“It’s a pretty unlucky situation,” agreed ChrisTFer, “we are planning on moving to America the week after we get back from TakeTV, which is a really awkward timeline for us. We kinda wish we had more knowledge about the event and maybe we could have spoken to Blizzard about getting the C9 treatment.

“In fairness to blizzard they had no idea about our move and I'm guessing that if they had it might have been different. Our plan is to hope that TakeTV are generous enough to let us use their PCs on the Sunday and we can try to play the qualifiers from there. It will mean an extremely long day and playing on high ping but it’s pretty much the best we can hope for at this stage.”

That’s an incredible workload for the team as they split focus between a major event and qualifying on 100+ ping for another. They are also only able to play in the Sunday qualifier, halving their opportunities. Chris feels confident in their ability though despite the adversity, but is aware how hard it will be. “The best 8 teams in NA should qualify on the Saturday so I have no doubt we are good enough to make it, but it’s gonna be an insanely long day, and playing till 6 am after a long LAN is going to be super stressful, so I’m not sure.”

Depending on how large the Sunday bracket is for the NA OWC qualifier, Hammers may have a task simply keeping up their level and avoiding upsets. They must also hope that TaKeOver 2 doesn’t have delays, as their eggs are all in the Sunday basket due to overlaps in the Saturday schedule. “Ironically if we perform very well on the LAN we mightn't have an opportunity to qualify at all,” Chris remarked.

Hollywood Hammers have a reasonable chance at going deep in the tournament. Though it’s a stacked field, they’ve been improving and diversifying their style, and LAN can be a different beast to online.

ChrisTFer gave us his thoughts on TaKeOver 2 and the battle between EU and NA:

I’m assuming we got an invite due to someone dropping out. I think people will probably consider us the worst team at the LAN, so low expectations can be nice to play under. However honestly LAN is completely different to scrims, we at least have lan experience as a team and we are definitely prepared for every team. Teams without experience on LAN might struggle once things go wrong and I'm hopeful that we don't have that problem. Half the teams at the LAN we expect to play purely dive, whereas the other half we expect to play Rienhardt comps. The thing I’m looking forward to seeing is which teams can adapt as the tournament progresses. I also think the overall strength of teams going might be the highest for any Western tournament ever. I think there is an obvious bias from teams from both regions about which is stronger. But honestly, the fact that no teams are playing triple dps dive, or winston dive [in NA] really makes me question some things. I considered ourselves a really good triple tank team and we struggled a lot this meta. I'm really interested to know how we match tank vs tank vs the best NA teams and also how our dive can beat the Pharah Mercy things which they seem to like. Watching NA tournaments is always very interesting because it almost seems like EU and NA are playing on different patches.

TaKeOver 2 begins on June 1st to June 4th, with the North American Overwatch Contenders qualifiers on June 3rd-4th.