Matt Rider

Last updated
Zalmah
Personal information
NameMatt Rider
NationalityBritish
Career information
Games World of Warcraft

Matt Rider, also known by the pseudonym Zalmah, is a former professional electronic sports player and commentator.

Rider became European Champion of World of Warcraft at Blizzcon 2007 with 'Per 'Lykke' Nielsen'. He was signed by Championship Gaming Series (CGS) when DirectTV planned to broadcast World of Warcraft to a mainstream television audience. He placed second at the 2v2 World Finals at Sony Studios, Los Angeles and qualified for 5v5 European finals in Hamburg.

In 2008 he relocated to Cologne, Germany to work for Electronic Sports League as host and editor with James "2GD" Harding and Joe Miller (commentator). Broadcasting the Intel Extreme Masters, he provided commentary for World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike 1.6 tournaments, presenting live at CeBit and Gamescom.

In 2009 he produced the weekly internet World of Warcraft show WoW Wednesdays which attracted a regular viewership before the emergence of streaming platforms like Twitch.

In 2011 over 1.5 million unique viewers watched him present the esports finals live at DreamHack, the world's largest digital festival and lan party.

In 2018 Rider founded Play Context, an independent publishing label for entertainment.

Related Research Articles

Matt Vasgersian American sportscaster

Matt Vasgersian is an American sportscaster and television host. Vasgersian is a play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Angels, as well as a studio host for MLB Network. In the past, he has served as an announcer for Fox Sports' National Football League and Major League Baseball coverage, ESPN's coverage of Major League Baseball, NBC Sports' coverage of the Olympic Games, and NBC Sports' coverage of the original XFL. He formerly called play-by-play for the Milwaukee Brewers and the San Diego Padres.

Ivan de Prume is a heavy metal drummer whose music became famous in the groove metal band White Zombie.

Chris Rose American sportscaster

Christopher Rose is an American sportscaster for the NFL Network. He is also a commentator for the Discovery Channel series BattleBots and podcast host for Jomboy Media.

SK Gaming

SK Gaming is a professional esports organization based in Germany that has teams across the world competing in different titles. SK is particularly known for their success in Counter-Strike (CS) tournaments. SK's Brazilian CS team won the ESL One Cologne 2016 Major. SK currently has players and teams competing in League of Legends and Hearthstone. SK Gaming was founded in 1997 by a small group of Quake players in Oberhausen.

Patrick O'Neal is an American actor and sports broadcaster who has been serving as a studio host/reporter for Bally Sports West/SoCal. He is also the secondary TV play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Angels whenever Matt Vasgersian is not available for telecasts.

Paul Chaloner Esports commentator

Paul "Redeye" Chaloner is a former professional esports and video game broadcast host from Shoreham-by-Sea, England.

Sky (gamer)

Li Xiaofeng, who also goes by the pseudonym "Sky" or "WE.Sky", is a Chinese former professional gamer of the popular Blizzard Entertainment real-time strategy game Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. He played for the China-based World Elite team. He is considered one of the best Human players in the game's history by World Cyber Games In the past few years he has been heavily involved with coaching Team WE's League of Legends team.

Championship Gaming Series Defunct esports league

The Championship Gaming Series was an international esports league based in the United States, with teams from several other countries. The CGS was preceded by the 2006 Championship Gaming Invitational, a television pilot featuring several future CGS players. The league was founded in 2007 and was owned and operated by DirecTV in association with British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) and STAR TV. It folded in 2008 after two seasons.

The expansion to the computer game Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, known as The Frozen Throne, had an active professional competition scene, particularly in China, Germany, and South Korea. The game was featured at eSports festivals including the World Cyber Games, the Electronic Sports World Cup, the World e-Sports Games, the World Series of Video Games and the International E-Sports Festival. Outside of the professional circuit, the game had many active competitive circuits, with users at Battle.net ranging between 70,000 and 100,000 at any given moment. In China, in which Warcraft III was extremely popular due to it being easily available through piracy, fans and users often used an alternative client due to the country's poor internet connections to the outside world. Around 3,000,000 copies of the game were sold in the country. 500,000 Chinese competed in the Chinese qualifiers for the 2006 World Cyber Games. The amount of prize money through the years has been significant with top players winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. As usual in competitive gaming, income for Warcraft 3 professional players flowed from various sources like team salaries from pro-gaming teams and sponsorships usually computer technology related. A famous example was the Danish gaming organization known as Meet Your Makers which boasted of paying their players US$300,000 on an annual basis. Similar to older games with huge competitive scenes like Starcraft:Brood War and Counter-Strike 1.6, the popularity of Warcraft 3 steadily declined and towards the end of the previous decade almost all tournaments and players were Chinese. After 2010, with Starcraft 2, League of Legends, and Dota 2 being released and becoming popular, Warcraft 3 gave up its position as one of the prime eSports titles.

ToD French video gamer

Yoan "ToD" Merlo is a French former professional player of the real-time strategy games Warcraft III and Starcraft II. In WarCraft III he played as the Human race and in StarCraft he played as Protoss. he was signed to the top esports team in the United Kingdom, Four-Kings, until November 7, 2007, when he decided not to renew his contract for unspecified reasons. He later explained in an interview that the dissatisfying results of the Four Kings team were the reason for his departure. After much speculation, Merlo unexpectedly joined the team Mousesports on December 1, 2007.

In 2008, the Championship Gaming Series began its second season as a worldwide sports league for professional video gamers. A total of 18 teams representing cities in seven countries played in the league. The games supported included Counter-Strike: Source, Dead or Alive 4, FIFA 08, and Forza Motorsport 2.

Joe Miller (commentator) British esports commentator

Joe Miller or JOEE is a British commentator. He started his career as an esports caster at gaming tournaments, working his first event shoutcasting Battlefield 1942. The 3D World War II first-person shooter (FPS) video game was coincidentally also the first game Miller played at a competitive level. At age sixteen, he began to commentate BF1942 games at home in the UK, pushing out as many audio commentaries as he could. In an interview with JP McDaniel, Miller revealed that it was a "big jump" from the audio commentaries he initially produced to the audio-video commentaries we are accustomed to today.

Serious Gaming Dutch professional gaming team

Serious Gaming is a professional gaming team based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was founded in 2004 by entrepreneur Bas Peeperkorn. Serious Gaming is known for their achievements in first-person shooter Deathmatch tournaments, most notably those by Quake series players Maciej "av3k" Krzykowski and Alexey "cypher" Yanushevsky.

Intel Extreme Masters Series of international esports tournaments

The Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) is a series of international esports tournaments held in countries around the world. These Electronic Sports League (ESL) sanctioned events, sponsored by Intel, as of 2022 currently host events in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and StarCraft II. Other game titles were hosted in the past. The body that owns the league is Turtle Entertainment. The League has operated 16 seasons as of 2022. The season finals, with the largest prize pool, takes place in Katowice, Poland. Mid-season events are held in numerous cities around the globe, including Chicago, Shanghai and Sydney.

Dennis Gehlen German electronic sports announcer

Dennis Gehlen, also known as TaKe, is a German professional StarCraft II commentator and works as a freelancer for Turtle Entertainment which hosts ESL-TV as well as the Electronic Sports League.

Fly100% Chinese professional player

Lu Weiliang, who also goes by the pseudonym Fly100%, is a Chinese professional esports player of the real-time strategy game Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. He previously been a member of Team Hacker, EHOME and Mousesports. He is considered one of the best Orc players. He had one of the longest playing careers of professional players of Warcraft III.

Wang Xuwen, who goes by the pseudonym Infi, is a Chinese professional esports player of the real-time strategy games Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne and Starcraft II. He previously served in team World Elite, Tyloo and VICI GAMING. He is considered one of the best Human players in the world. In 2008, World Elite was the best team of the year and Wang Xuwen was the core member. In 2009, Wang Xuwen helped World Elite obtain the champion of Warcraft III Champions League Season XIV. Additionally, Wang Xuwen also has many individual champion titles from various Premier Tournaments such as World Cyber Games and World e-Sports Games. From 2008 to 2011, the Chinese competitive scene for Warcraft III was dominated by 4 players, Lu "Fly100%" Weiliang, Li "Sky" Xiaofeng, Wang "Infi" Xuwen and Huang "TH000"Xiang. Wang "Infi" Xuwen and the other three were considered the four kings in Chinese Warcraft III. He played Starcraft II for a few years before retiring from competitive gaming.

Lyn (gamer)

Park "Lyn" June (Korean: 박준) is a professional Starcraft II Terran player and former Warcraft III Orc player from South Korea. Lyn was a successful Warcraft III player before transitioning to Starcraft II. He is the only player to have won almost all of the premier tournaments, including the World Cyber Games, Electronic Sports World Cup, BlizzCon and Intel Extreme Masters. The only two premier tournaments which he has never won are the World e-Sports Games and International E-Sports Festival, instead placing second in the World e-Sports Games in 2008 and 2010, and in the International E-Sports Festival in 2007. The total prize money Lyn has won playing Warcraft 3 is behind only Jang "moon" Jae-ho.

References

  1. Play Context: https://PlayContext.com
  2. Website: https://ZALMAH.com
  3. Twitter: https://twitter.com/RiderMatt