#insomnia 61

Following a dry spell of nothing from Multiplay about the future of their esports tournaments, Insomnia Events’ Twitter has confirmed that one of its popular tournaments, Team Fortress 2, will be seeing a return back to show the best of the best for community 6v6 TF2.

The Insomnia series has been heralded as one of the most important live LAN events for competitive TF2 action. Since i46, it has been considered the international deciding grounds for which continent and team deserves to be called the Best Team in TF2. Last year for i58, Crowns Esports Club dominated over fellow European team Full Tilt Esports and North American giants froyotech. 

This is the first instance of hearing that i61 will have TF2. With only 2 months before the event, criticism has arisen that the announcement came far later than it should have, strengthened by b4nny’s sentiment from his Twitter a few days before when he mentioned the difficulties of flight costs and fundraising non-sponsored teams to go:

A while ago, Insomnia 61 announced their official Team Fortress 2 tournament would be making a return. They have followed up a week or so later with a prize pot announcement, stating they wil be going with their standard 5K pounds prize pot. 

Due to the nature of TF2 being Multiplay’s bigger international esports tournament, people argued that the announcement came far too late - an opinion also expressed by Grant “b4nny” Vincent of froyotech before the announcement from Multiplay happened, due to difficulties of fundraising costs and other logistics.

Now, it seems like North American giants froyotech will not be making their return to the iSeries stage in the UK. A tweet accompanied with a Twitlonger posted by b4nny confirmed his team will not be coming to i61 this year:

A couple members of the team are uninterested in attending, and in a domino-like fashion others have similarly lost interest. So instead of repeating the mistakes of forcing an inferior version of our team to compete like we did at i58, we have decided to sit out the tournament.

However, b4nny himself has expressed interest in going to i61 to still compete, for his own sake:

That said, I am still interested in going myself. It would be a shame to break my streak of 5 I-series summer LANs in a row. 

If any high level teams need a ringer for the event, feel free to reach out to me and maybe we can make something work.

b4nny has been competing in the iSeries TF2 set of tournaments since i46 on Leviathan Gaming, who came 2nd in an NA grand finals against Classic Mixup. froyotech has won 2 iSeries events - i52 and i55 - and placed 3rd at i58 last year. 

I finished editing a video for my sister to upload on to her YouTube channel, for clips she took whilst at Insomnia 61, and then she asked me to take out a clip from the video, and give to her to put on Twitter.

So I thought I would post it here too XD