I’ve been enjoying watching the Michigan Tech Esports teams compete since their streams on Twitch.tv started up this season. You may remember I wrote a story about them and Finlandia University’s team late last year.

It’s an interesting time to watch esports, because both the way the tournaments work, and the way they’re presented to viewers, are both very much still in development. Twitch is also interesting in that the stream is accompanied by a chatroom for viewers and even the stream hosts, so you can actually text back and forth when watching live.

Recordings of the matches will be available on Twitch for a week after they’re made, so I’ve linked them below if you want to take a look at how things are shaping up.

This week, I watched them play Rocket League (soccer with cars) and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (terrorists vs. anti-terrorists), and all three matches were very competitive and entertaining.

Two of the matches were on MTU’s own streaming channel on Twitch, MTUEsports, with local student hosts. One Rocket League game was on GameTime_Live as part of their Midwest Collegiate Invitational.

Thursday, the team narrowly lost a 5-game match against the University of Michigan, with low-scoring, high-pressure games. Each game lasts 5 minutes unless they need a sudden-death tiebreaker, which happened more than once throughout the match.

Almost immediately following that tough loss, the team jumped into The Midwest Collegiate Invitational to compete against the University of Waterloo again, this time narrowly beating them in an edge-of-your-seat set of games. Michigan Tech’s match was the second of two in the stream and starts about 50 minutes in.

Michigan Tech’s CS:GO team played against Michigan State, and won two of the three games they played in the match. After bringing the hammer down on the Spartans in the first game, they fell behind early in the second game and narrowly failed to make a comeback, but fought hard and won the victory in the third game.