Recently, our FIFA fan-favorite, Zain Ali Shah traveled to Malaysia on a sponsored trip to participate in ES Football Championship which was organized by Gamesbond. Now before we go ahead and tell you about his performance, we would like to give you an introduction to Gamesbond and appreciate them for their efforts towards promotion of Esports in all of Asia.
Gamesbond was founded back in 2015 by Fazli Razak and Suki Lee with the goal of becoming the most successful and renowned sports center of Malaysia. Over the years they’ve hosted plenty of tournaments in the country with one of them being the ES Championship, which was a FIFA tournament in collaboration with the mighty EA Sports itself.
The ES Championship 2019 included sponsored players from 15 invited Asian countries which were Pakistan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Singapore, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Brunei, Myanmar, Maldives, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, and Hong Kong. It was a three day event where on the first day, the players were briefed and sorted into groups. On the second day, the group-stages and the quarter finals took place. On the last day, the qualifying players competed for the semi-finals and finals. The knockout stages were played on two legs aggregate where a player was not allowed to pick the same team more than once. The prize-pool of the tournament was $10,000 which contained prizes for players all the way down to the 16th position and the winner going to Madrid to participate in a much bigger competition.
Pakistan Cyber Gaming’s Zain Ali Shah fought bravely to make his way to the Top-16 through a very competitive group but however, luck was not on his side in the Ro16 where he lost to Rainesual by 3-2 on aggregate. In a heartfelt message on his Facebook profile Zain apologized to Pakistan for not making it further in the tournament, but we’re as proud as we could be. Keep your head up, champ!
Lastly, another shout out to Gamesbond for pulling off such a huge event successfully and looking forward to many more in the future!
