Gamers Lounge: Egypt's Pro Players

E-sports world tournaments take place in America, Canada, and South Korea with outrageous prizes amounting to millions of dollars for the best gamers in the world. In Egypt however, Gamers Lounge is the one of the few organisations that put together these professional competitions, cultivating a new community of like-minded players right here in Cairo. Founded by a group of professional Egyptian gamers, Gamers Lounge aims to "bring together all of Egypt's e-Sports fans and promote online gaming through competitive tournaments," Hashem Al-Borno tells us.

Al-Borno adds that, they “started Gamers Lounge in February, and organised the first tournament in March where 32 clans (Teams) played DOTA 2 and the prizes were a total of 3500 LE for the first three places."

Gamers Lounge organise four tournaments per year with 37 clans having signed up to battle it out for the upcoming Dota 2 Summer Cup, fighting their way to the grand cash prize. The other tournaments will see them play Counter Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends.  

“We actually chose these games because we are focused on online competitive games and they are the most popular competitive games in Egypt with a lot of participants, especially in LOL and Dota 2,” Al-Borno says. “Getting accurate stats on the number of players in Egypt is hard because you can’t pull such information from any of the games clients.However, roughly, I would say there are 15,000 LOL players in Egypt and not less than 5,000 Dota 2 players. We are considering adding Call of Duty and Battlefield but for now we are focused on these games.”