IEM IV World Champion Shane "rapha" Hendrixson is featured in the first of a three part video interview in the SK Gaming 1on1 series. QuakeLive's #1 player talks about his rise from an unproven up and comer to the top of the competitive scene in around a year and a half.

How did the experience of losing amongst other things at his first event, ESWC Masters Paris, help him? What part has practice with ZeRo4 and av3k played in rapha's progression as a player? Asked to pick three maps for a tournament which one current rotation map does he select and which two from Quake 3's past?

The interview can be watched on SK Gaming.

LowLandLions has been consistently adding players to its StarCraft roster, which started by picking up the StarCraft legend Jos "ret" de Kroon and later World of Warcraft hero Olivier "Orly" Bellemans.

Today, they have added another player to their already exquisite roster, adding Ian "zion" Gryncewicz, who has been playing StarCraft for years on end and has now made the transition into StarCraft II Beta as well.

He will be training together with the LowLandLions StarCraft players and hopefully, they will all be able to improve together and keep on growing in this new game.

Ian had the following to say about joining up:

My name is Ian ,(zion) and i'm 22 year's old. I've been hyper ever since the beta came out and when I joined LLL, I suddenly had a huge motivation boost. I am hoping to improve a lot in the future in preparation for upcoming lans or tournaments.

Be sure to check out the LowLandLions website for the announcement and to see who is in the line-up: LowLandLions.com.

Looks like Blizzard is handing out more keys for the StarCraft II Beta. I've heard from a lot of people who got this email and it seems to be legit:

There was no official game some time in Quake2. Why's that? Oh, right, the last NDML season was canceled after only 8 teams signed up... Q2scene spent a year (sobbing and) waiting for the NDML9 to come. And here it is! A few days ago, Gravgon announced he is looking for active teams to compete in a new season of the league! The number of teams, which was not enough for the league to be run last year (8), was said to be enough this year. But as it turns out, it's not that easy to gather 8 nations to play.

This spawned a discussion what to do so the league starts and, as Gravgon put it, doesn't feel "forced" with half-active teams and imaginary countries. That's when the NDML9: Invitational idea emerges, but that leaves a bunch of questions: who to invite, on what conditions, what would be the league layout, considering the small number of teams. How would you like the league to look like? How do you see it? Post your ideas!

Links: NDML, #ndml

Scheduled: 16:00 CDT, 17 March 2010 to 17:30 CDT, 17 March 2010
Schedule: Passed

The ESLs weekly Quake Live show will this week bring you the start of the German ESL Pro Series Quake Live Tournament. Join Joe Miller and James "2GD" Harding as they bring you all the action of this German All-Star League!

This weeks match will be between calipt and R1EPA


Links: ESL TV, Details

Scheduled: 14:00 CDT, 18 March 2010 to 16:00 CDT, 18 March 2010
Schedule: Passed

ESports Heaven has announced a new One Night Wonder tournament but, for the first time, Quake Live players will take centre-stage.

This is the first of potentially many as ESports Heaven states that "over the next few weeks we will be running several small and bigger One Night Wonder as we dabble around with the rules, formats and overall plans we have for Quake Live".

32 players are set to take part although more slots may be made available if there is sufficient demand. These players will compete in a single elimination bracket. The tournament gets underway at 14:00 CDT on March 18th.


Links: Announcement, Cup page, Sign-up, #esportsheaven

Scheduled: 11:00 CDT, 19 March 2010 to 16:00 CDT, 19 March 2010
Schedule: Passed

The Electronic Sports League has announced a StarCraft II invitational featuring 16 of Europe's finest players which is to take place upcoming Friday at 11:00 CDT and is estimated to last roughly five hours.

The tournament will consist of a single elimination bracket with best-of-three matches, excluding the finals which will be best-of-five. At stake in the event is 200€ as well as five beta keys which will be raffled away among viewers. The matches will be streamed by ESL TV and provided with German commentary.

Final: Lucifron 3-0 Liquid`Nazgul (Replay)


Links: Brackets including Replays, ESL TV

House Of Quake wants to welcome and introduce you to the new Quake Leagues. HOQ will have Quake Live and Rocket Arena II leagues. There will be Quake Live Duel, Quake Live Clan Arena 2v2, Quake Live Clan Arena 3v3 and Quake2 Rocket Arena II 2v2 Leagues. The map list of each game mode can be discussed at HOQ forum since map list does not have final decision. All participants have to idle on #HoQLeagues. The head admin of these leagues is HowHard and the deadline to sign-up is 17:00 CDT, 31 March 2010.

Info and sign-ups:

Duel
CA 2v2
CA 3v3
RA2 2v2

Download: Quake II - Rocket Arena 2

This weekend we saw the completion of the Quake Live 1v1 tournament at LAN ETS, a 700 person BYOC in Montreal giving away over $15,000 in prize money. We all invite you and encourage you to come to the next event! Thank you to DeepKilla for administrating the tournament, and Syncerror for providing servers for the event!

Final Standings:

1st Gillz ($200)
2nd Freelance ($125)
3rd Blatrix ($75)

Videos: Casted streams by muhu
Links: Brackets, Info, ETS Gallery, Area51 News Post, Flickr Gallery

The 4 qualification cups for the next EMS VI Quakelive TDM have been announced and will start with the first cup on Wednesday, 24th March at 14:00 CDT. The top3 teams from each of these qualification cups will earn a slot for the Group Stage. As the number of participating teams in this new season will be 16, the top4 teams from the previous season are getting a direct invitation.


The sign-ups are already opened!

Link: Announcement, EMS VI

A bit of pitwhoring on Deck16

First Quake Live CTF NC playoff week started today with awesome matches ahead of us. Look at the Playoff tree and Roster for more details.
Also important thing to mention is that in Quake Live TDM NC only one match more needs to be played between Slovakia and Poland in the group stage before the start of playoffs next week.
Unfortunately, there will be no additional time for scheduling playoff matches like there was for CTF NC, which means that playoffs start next week and all challenging must be done in this week.


Links: Rules update-Demos Policy, CTF NC, TDM NC, Twitter
Calendars: CTF, TDM
Rankings: CTF, TDM
Rules: CTF, TDM
Player stats: CTF, TDM

After one week break because of the IEM4 World Finals, we are bringing new information about the QQC QLTDM NC2010. Five rounds of the group stage are almost finished. The last match, which will be played on this Sunday 14th of March will decide the second advancing team in Group A. Team Sweden will face team Netherlands tonight at 15:00 CDT. Match will be streamed on lvlup and right after the game we will announce the playoff. So don't miss the broadcast.

Two matches have been played last week which decided more advancing teams. On Tuesday UK won their match against Russia 2-1. This victory secured UK their spot in playoff from 1st place. Because of the loss Russia ended on 3rd place with 7 points, but unfortunately only the top2 teams go to playoff.

Another important match between Italy and Hungary was played on Wednesday. The advancing team wasn't decided by points gained from the match, but the match itself decided who advance. Italy won their map which was qzdm6 which was first step towards the playoff. Second map was qzdm20 and Hungary managed to get a victory there so the match moved to a deciding map. Hungary managed to win again and with the victory they secured a slot in playoff.

Playoff officially starts on Sunday at midnight and I remind you that live broadcast will be on stream lvlup right after SWE vs NED. There is only one way for Sweden to advance to play-off and that's 2-0 win against Netherlands. If they will win 2-1, Finland will take 2nd place because of the game between these two teams.

Link: Group Stage

Scheduled: 08:00 CDT, 14 March 2010 to 13:50 CDT, 14 March 2010
Schedule: Passed

Known for its QuakeLive Cups ZOTACs next Starcraft 2 Beta Cup takes places next Sunday, 08:00 CDT, 14 March 2010. There's 100 € pricemoney up for grabs and since cup #2 had 331 signups and the full 256 slots after check-ins covered they decided to make it bigger this time (1024 slots for signups, 512 for check-ins).

Final:
RoX.KIS.DIMAGA 3-1 MYM]DeMusliM


Stream: ZOTAC|koik & AZRAELeva & Millenium WebTV
Links: Brackets, Info, Playerlist, Sign-up, #zotac.sc2