Another year, another award winning Battle of Malta; This year bigger than ever! With 35 tournaments and a €1 million guaranteed prize pool for the main event, a massive turnout of thousands of players from all around the world was expected, and delivered. Hosted between the 15th – 22nd October 2019, this year’s Battle of Malta event organized by Casino Malta at the Intercontinental Hotel in St Julian’s (More specifically the Intercontinental Arena and Cettina De Cesere Hall) was a massive success. The main event was won by Moldovan player Serghei Lisii who cashed out a cool €247,167 along with the winner’s trophy, with Dutch player Steven van Zadelhoff coming in as runner up with a cashout of €217,167.
The recorded total prize pool was a staggering €2,258,645 with over 4,657 entries; Both metrics breaking last year’s records and holding high standards for next years 2020 event.
However an event of this magnitude requires a lot of behind the scenes work, engineering calculations and complex planning, which is where we come in. With countless meetings and hundreds of collective hours spent planning this event, here’s the short version of what we were entrusted to in this behemoth of an event, along with our thought process behind it.
Crisp and clear announcements were a must have for this event. This was ensured by an even distribution of speakers and subwoofers all throughout the venue, as well as our professional wireless Sennheiser microphones connected to our Behringer X-32 mixer, allowing for precise tweaking capabilities by our onsite operators.
To help create a unique atmosphere at this year’s Battle of Malta, lighting was given extreme importance. Boasting over 30 moving head fixtures, 40 LED Bars and various other forms of lighting such as fresnals and city colours, helped to create a magical atmosphere at the Intercontinental Arena. All of these fixtures were connected to our Evolites Titan lighting mixer, allowing for seamless control of each individual light.
Considering the nature of this event it can be said that the vision aspect was one of, if not the most important aspect that we were entrusted to. With 4 overhead mounted TV’s, 5 TV’s at ground level, and 2 9K lumens projectors used to project the game timings on the massive front and back walls, it proved quite a challenge to plan and control all these individual feed. We were also entrusted with providing the necessary outputs required for the HD streaming of the event.
The engineering that allows for the various fixtures and TV’s to be mounted up in the air is not an easy feat, and requires various planning, safety precautions and load calculation analysis by our warranted team of engineers. For this year’s event, a cross shape truss structure was used which spanned across the majority of the massive Intercontinteal arena. Take a look at our setup video attached below to see how this massive structure was erected bit by bit.
Every setup has its own challenges and issues; However after weeks of planning, we’re super happy with the result we’ve managed to come up with. Having been entrusted yet again with another Battle of Malta AV setup was an honor for us, and a testament of our professionalism in the local gaming event scene. On to the next event!