Over the past weekend, the America East Conference had its second Esports Invitational in which Stony Brook’s Goober707 came away with the win against Binghamton’s, Rawk. The Esports Invitational was a tournament where students from all 10 America East schools competed online against one another playing the video game Super Smash Bros. The first America East Esports Invitational was held on April 24, 2020, and had 50 students competing.

In this year’s tournament which was streamed on both America East’s Twitch and YouTube channel, there were 64 online gamers who were competing against one another for scholarship cash prizes. The winner of the tournament, Goober707, was rewarded $1,500 dollars, the runner up, Rawk won $500 dollars, third place finisher from NJIT won $300 dollars, and fourth place finisher from the University of Albany won $200 dollars.

Esports, which in short, are simply a sport where video game fanatics compete against one another in video games. There are various types of video games that gamers can play against one another including popular sports games like Madden NFL and NBA 2K, to survival games like Fortnite and Call of Duty. Not only can Esports gamers compete against each other for prizes, but the typical video game enthusiast can watch some of their favorite Esports gamers play video games by watching live streams on various platforms like Twitch.

With new video games being released to consumers at a fast rate, Esports have grown increasingly popular over the past few years. There are over 175 Esports programs who compete in the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NAC). The University of Hartford added Esports during the 2020-2021 school year, and is the only school in the America East Conference to recognize Esports as a varsity sport.

The final standings and results from the second Esports Invitational can be seen below: