Fortnite World Cup Concludes with Winners Becoming Millionaires
The Fortnite World Cup has concluded with an exciting finish, dishing out $30 million shared out amongst the winners.
Kyle ‘Bugha’ Giersdorf won the solo event in the Fortnite World Cup with an end total of 59 points, a full 26 points ahead of the closest competitor in second place. The 16 year old took home $3 million for his performance and is joined by another three players from the United States in the top 5 of the Solo competition.
Giersdorf held the top spot for the most part of the competition and in his first match, achieved a Victory Royale with nine eliminations to get 19 points. His second match score him zero points, but then he recovered in every subsequent game after that, to score points for placement and eliminations. In fact, he was so good, that his final match saw him 15 points ahead of second.
This mean, that the then 2nd place player would need to go into the final game, achieve Victory Royale as well as net six eliminations, something that isn’t impossible, but definitely very hard to do. In addition to that, Giersdorf would have needed to go scoreless in the final match, so it all seemed very unlikely.
The European pair David ‘aqua’ W. and Emil ‘Nyhrox’ Pedersen became champions too over the weekend. Saturday night saw the pair from Austria and Norway respectively, edge home a win by four points over their second-place rivals. The pair take home a grand prize of $300,000.
There was also a celebrity Pro-Am tournament that took place at the World Cup and the winners, Karim ‘Airwaks’ Benghalia and RL Grime took the win. They left the tournament $1 million richer than they started it. Benghalia is a former League of Legends player, who was best known for his role as jungler for Team ROCCAT. RL Grime, on the other hand, is an American producer of trap and bass music.
The tournament catapults 13 new players into the top 100 of esports earning throughout the world, putting the new millionaire, Giersdorf into the top 10. He joins TI winners such as Kuro ‘KuroKy’ Takhasomi, Amer ‘Miracle- ‘Al-Barkawi and Johan ‘N0tail’ Sundstein, all of Dota 2 fame who currently reside at the top ten of overall highest earners in esports.
These numbers are likely to change when Valve’s TI9 starts in August and if any of the players in the top 100 are able to take a podium finish, will likely head to the top of the list by an extreme margin.
With the Fortnite World Cup done and dusted for 2019, great times were had by all, new millionaires were made, and the amount of esports spectators increased drastically. Epic Games has yet to confirm whether or not a Fornite World Cup will take place in 2020, but they have confirmed that the new Fortnite Championship Series will begin when season 10 kicks off, which is scheduled to be sometime this week.
