It’s his job to work with top Twitch broadcasters, help burgeoning esports teams, and, relevant to Team Archon, help those teams refine their pitches to sponsors. After officially announcing the twelve-week team tournament, Kaskel called John Howell, the director of partnerships and core services at Twitch. In the end, securing Amazon and Alphadraft as tournament sponsors became possible due to the intervention of the third major sponsor: Twitch. “Cool” in that he and Chan were willing to go deep into debt to pay the prize pool, not “cool” in that Kaskel and Chan have hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance such a venture. He and I both came to the conclusion that if we both lost $125,000… it was like ‘Ok, cool.’’ “Amaz asked me how much money I had in the bank. “It was literally a five second conversation,” Kaskel said. The tournament and prize money ended up being sponsored primarily by AlphaDraft and Amazon, though at the time, no company had technically agreed to help fund the prizes. Specifically, the potential loss of great public relations with a decent amount of the Twitch viewing community’s interest piqued and other pros commenting positively on the idea after it was leaked, Chan and Kaskel didn’t think they could then say no.īut what had been leaked was that it would be a tournament with a $250,000 prize pool. They felt the negative consequences of ultimately not running the competition were too great. Ultimately, they decided to organize the ATLC tournament, prize pool be damned. Additionally, they still did not have a firm, nailed-down commitment from any sponsor to agree to put up prize pool money.Īfter weeks of questions, Team Archon had to make a decision. Kaskel and Chan panicked because they still weren’t completely sure they could successfully organize a lengthy tournament their feeling was that trying to do so and failing at any point would have an overall negative impact on the Hearthstone community as a whole. “Everybody in Amaz’s for two plus weeks were like ‘What is this league?’” “That was panic attack time,” Kaskel said. They still aren’t sure who leaked the information - one of their sponsors or one of the other eight people that knew about it - but in the immediate aftermath, it wasn’t especially relevant anyway. It wasn’t something that someone had made up, it was clearly a leak.”īeyond their sponsors and their own organization, Team Archon had been in contact with six elite streamers and two team managers, they said. “It was way too detailed and way too exact. “Suddenly, someone leaks that Team Archon is going to be doing this huge team league with too much information, honestly,” Park said. As they were negotiating with sponsors about the exact prize pool amount, information about the tournament was leaked. Soon eight became 16, which became 24, and then 32, and then “Okay, let’s just run a fuckin’ league,” Kaskel said.īefore anything could be decided for sure, though, control over the situation soon left Team Archon’s hands. Then others who knew about the nascent tournament also wanted to participate. The original idea consisted of a day of constructed competition, another day with an arena-like format, and a third day that blended the two formats and eight people. So we actually started planning for a house cup, and the house cup just ended up becoming more and more complicated.”Īs Team Archon tried to nail down the logistics of a house cup tournament, it began to grow faster and larger than Kaskel and Chan had anticipated. “We just didn’t want to have that type of responsibility. “At this point in time, we told all of our sponsors no, we’re just not gonna run the league,” Kaskel said. Kaskel and Chan had also become increasingly enamored with the idea of a “house cup,” where all the competitors are in the same place for the event and Hearthstone would be the main focus, but interacting and messing around would also be an integral part Enough to feel comfortable running small events, but hardly event production specialists. When the sponsors initially pitched Team Archon about running the tournament, the team had, to that point, hosted four tournaments. It would have to take place over several weeks, a much more complicated production than the team was used to. To have a prize pool that large, the event couldn’t be something that happened over a single weekend. Much of their discomfort with the idea stemmed from the length of such a tournament.
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