The rivalry going on between Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley not only intensified during their big game at the Memorial Stadium, where Stanford Cardinal finished two touchdowns ahead of the UC Berkley Golden Bears. Before the football game happened, the two schools are already going at it in a collegiate League of Legends tournament, which was held in Oakland, California at the Oracle Center. The tournament was part of Intel's Extreme Masters XI competitive gaming tournament.
According to Kotaku, the Stanford and Berkeley match were supposed to be just an entertaining in-between exhibition for the main events with a hundred thousand dollars as prize money. Who would have known that this best-of-one series would become a very exciting match that many people did not expect. "I honestly wish the LPL drafted as well as these two teams drafted for this game" said Indiana "Froskurinn" Black, the tournament's color commentator, before the game began.
The match ended with Stanford beating their rivals from Cal in front of thousands of people at the arena and almost forty thousand people streaming online, according to SF Gate. "It's a big rivalry, and the fact it was on a big stage and streamed online - it felt like the Big Game of video games" said Alex Pao, age 19, one of the members of the Berkeley team who admitted he got really excited when he witnessed the size of the crowd and heard the audiences' cheers inside the arena.
"We felt like we were going to win the whole time, but at the end we did make some mistakes," commented Pao, about his team's performance during the game. "We were definitely too ambitious." The Stanford team's strategic retreats and changes in their strategies helped them make a huge comeback against the Berkeley team. "We use the term 'tilt' once the momentum gets you, but we kept a positive attitude and at the end, that helped us," said 18 year old Gabriel Saldivar of the Stanford team.
