George Georgallidis of Counter Logic Gaming

E-sports. It’s a new idea that has been on the rise over the last couple of years. Are they actual sports or are they something else? Well to George “HotshotGG” Georgallidis e-sports are his life. Georgallidis is the co-founder of one of the first North American based professional gaming corporations, Counter Logic Gaming. CLG was founded in 2010 by Georgallidis and his friend and teammate Alexander “Voodoo” Beutel, a very risky move, but one that has definitely paid off for the both of them and others just like them.

When CLG was founded it was formed simply as a professional League of Legends team. League of Legends is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, or MOBA for short. Ten players drop into one map as unique characters with unique abilities with five members on each team and each team must push up the map into the enemy base and destroy the power nexus in said base.

League of Legends, usually referred to as LoL, had one of the fastest growing player bases among any video game at the time sporting around 10 million active monthly players. Those numbers were definitely nothing to scoff at considering the game was not even one year old yet. This rapid growth and interest is what had Georgallidis thinking, “Could there be something more here?”.

As it turns out, there was something more to be discovered. CLG ended up winning LoL’s first ever North American Championship, which was a major accomplishment, as even in North American, foreign players and teams would end up winning the majority of the few e-sports tournaments held back in those days. This Championship has hosted at Madison Square Garden and shortly after CLG had won the championship they were bought by the Madison Square Garden Company. Now CLG has expanded to over ten different professional e-sports teams, which have been wildly successful over the highest levels of play.

All Georgallidis did was follow a passion of his, video games. In specific he wanted to play League of Legends and become one of the best players in the world. He took that opportunity and ran with it. Now his company and team is part of one of the fastest growing industries in the world today. The wonderful, spectacular world of E-sports.