Russian sport system is built so that a sport, regardless of its international status, has to pass several steps of the state recognition. Namely they are:
– state registration of an association developing the competitive activity that has regional coverage enough to be national sport organization;
– inclusion of the competitive activity (sport) in the first (trial) part of the National Register of Sports;
– inclusion in the second part of the Register;
– assigning the organization with the rights of national sport governing body (one year trial);
– and finally the state accreditation.
The state accreditation is valid for four years and gives a federation the full number of rights of the sport governing body and exclusivity in its particular sport which includes official competitions recognized by the government, formation of the official national teams for international competitions.
Russian eSports Federation, existing for more than 18 years, was one of the first organizations to achieve the official recognition of esports by the state in 2001. Since then RESF has held more than 1000 competitions with total number of participants exceeding 350 000.
In recent years, public interest towards esports has been growing rapidly. This allowed RESF to develop into number one esport organization in Russia and to partner such key esport stakeholders as Mail.Ru Group and ESForce Holding. Among partners of the Russian eSports Federation are mobile providers Yota and MegaFon, fast-food chain KFC, social networks VK.com and OK.ru, and leading sport medias as Match TV, Sport Express, Sovetsky Sport.
Russian Ministry of sports assigned RESF with the rights of a sport governing body (one year trial) a year ago. After that, RESF continued its annual traditional national and local competitions. RESF is now represented in 68 regions (of 85 total). 54 of regional divisions have local state sport accreditation. Also, 250 esports referees has been trained. This demonstrated our efforts and provided proper background for the permanent state accreditation.
This year RESF has already conducted the Championship of Russia, the National Student League competitions. The third fundamental traditional annual esports event, the “RESF Open” will have an open format this year, which allows participants from other countries. The event will be held in three stages – preliminaries (LAN and online), main phase (online), and final LAN-competitions.
On July 23 the president of Russian eSports Federation Dmitry Smit and the Governor of Tyumen oblast Alexander Moor signed the agreement between RESF and the government of Tyumen Oblast about support and development of esports in the region. The RESF Open (its final stage), as the first result of this cooperation, will take place in December in Tyumen, hosted by one of the most advanced regional division of RESF.
The titles of the event are DOTA2, Hearthstone, StarCraft II, Clash Royale.
Official website of the Event (Russian)
Regulations of the RESF Open (English)
