This past Sunday I hosted the first BarCraft in Tucson at Skybar! We watched the latest Major League Gaming event known as Winter Arena, where 32 of the world's best StarCraft players competed against each other for over $25,000 in prizes. I'll admit, it took a lot of effort to organize the BarCraft. My friends at IBM had been talking about wanting to have one, but no one had any luck getting a bar to agree to it. I walked into Sky Bar one day and asked to talk to an event coordinator, who turned out to be someone I knew. He hooked me up with the e-mail of the owner of Sky Bar and Brooklyn Pizza, and I shortly reached out to him to try and sell him on the idea. He accepted and the rest of the time I spent organizing and advertising the event on Facebook, reddit, Team Liquid, making posters and handing to the U of A eSports team to help spread the word.
The end result was a successful showing at the first BarCraft in Tucson. About 70 people showed up when I was originally just hoping for 30-50. People from all over came to support BarCraft and I actually had a lot of fun, finding myself and everyone else cheering for the games that were being played on the screen.
It was a great opportunity to meet other StarCraft fans from around Tucson and people are already excited for the next BarCraft. I would like to host another, but it did take a lot of effort from my side and some out-of-pocket expenses. However, I learned so much about how to make future BarCrafts even better and so we'll see, maybe I'll look into having another one soon!
