by Sofia Degay
In compliance with the IOC movement which also put a lot weigh on ‘Female Promotion’, IeSF held its first Women’s Invitational Tournament with 2 of its official titles (Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Starcraft II) during IeSF 2012 World Championship. IeSF attempts to expand female gamers’ pool as promoting more female tournament in the future.
Young Russian female gamer ‘Sofia Degay’ won the champion within the tournament for Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and surprised other players and fans as she defeated Ye Sol Gil, the Korean female Tekken player who was anticipated the most to be the champion in this tournament. She is quite famous in Russia as ‘female master of Tekken’. As for other gamers, at the beginning, she started this for hobby, but she got into it intensively since she hates losing. Since most people agrees, even herself, that the Korean players are the strongest competitors, it is even surprising achievement for her as well. She mentioned that the Final stage with Ye Sol was the hardest match ever, and added that, “Ye Sol’s combo and skills were so much powerful. I am even more exited since I was not even expected that I would win.”
She is a 21years old student of the First Moscow Law Institute, and her life is quite typical for a student. She studies law and has a few hobbies such as drawing, writing stories. At the moment she spent most of her leisure time practicing in fighting games and participating in tournaments. she’s been playing videogames for almost 15 years and tried many fighting games such as BlazBlue: CS II, DoA, FF: Dicsidia, Soul Caibur and, of course, Tekken.
She entered her first tournament in 2011, it was Moscow Fighting Arena (MFA) ? the biggest Russian annual event among fighting competitions. Then, she started participating local and online tournaments regularly. When in 2012 SC5 came out, she was very impressed by the game and decided to participate in Fighting.ru Invitational. She showed very modest results at the prelims, since they didn’t have separate contest for female players.
After half of year hardcore practicing she took the 3rd place at solo and the 2nd place in command tournament in SC5 at MFA 2012. At the same time, she won Tekken Female competition, the IeSF Russian National Qualifier (which was hold for the first time in MFA history, only for Tekken) and qualified to the IeSF World Championship.
First time she tried playing Tekken is when she was 9. Since then she never gave up this game. The road started from Tekken 3 through Tekken 6 and now she is trying to master TTT2. She says that she likes mechanism of the game. Also, she found some interesting characters to play. In Russia, she said, “Tekken is one of the most popular games among fighting genre of games, and it has the biggest community and the one of the strongest competition level.”
She stated hardship of her competition this time that she didn’t have much time, because the game was released 3 weeks before the Championship.
The hardest things were to choose second character and to feel the new tag system. She mentioned that she found and studied a lot of useful information at TekkenZaibatsu.com. She knew she rained some good skills before the Championship, but she was very afraid of female players from Asia, and was pretty sure that Ye Sol from Korea would become the winner.
For the question asking her favorite player, she answered that she has heard of ‘Knee’ very much, because he is one of the world most famous Tekken players, and JDCR.
She thinks she won this championship because of proper matchup knowledge. She trained most of characters that she fought against at the competition, and she was lucky to have many mirror matches in this tournament. So she could know strong points and weak spots of the rivals. Also she had time to prepare herself to the final match against Ye Sol Gil since she lost her at the group stage. Her teammate Sineman (Sergei) helped her with this to make game plan for the match and to focus on it.
She described IeSF World Championship as very interesting experience. It was her first international event, and she had opportunity to play with many skilled players and met many new interesting people. She added that she hopes that it’s not her last tournament of this high level, and many thanks to the IeSF for everything organized very well.
In Russia, she mentioned about the states of female gamers, “There are not as many female gamers. Usually there is no such tournament especially for girls. I know only one girl in Moscow who trains her skill and participates in fighting games tournaments. Others play just for fan or because their boyfriends play. I was very surprised when 12 girls came to Russian IeSF qualifiers.” She added, “Right now it is too hard for a female player to compete with male players at usual competitions. A newbie needs really strong motivation to train hard and usually girls don’t have it. I think that female tournament can attract new female players, and even can help some girls become skilled players.
For the future, her primary goal is to graduate the university, and get a job. As for her future as a gamer, she wishes to participate in more international tournaments and see different countries. As stated above, her hope is the IeSF 2012 Championship would not be her last one. She hopes there will be more female tournaments in e-sports in future.
At last, she commented, “Play Tekken, get hype! “
