Gaming has been growing rapidly in India. Unsurprisingly, students are gaming more – and winning big. In May 2021, Red Bull Campus Clutch challenged student gamers across India.
Students needed to be Valorant players and team up with five other players to represent their campus. They would then compete across three phases: Qualifiers, National Finals, and World Final. If they won, they would create history for their university and their country.
OML Entertainment executed the Indian leg of the quarterfinals, semi-finals, and the finals of Red Bull Campus Clutch 2021. But they pushed it further by curating an entertainment segment as a filler between the semi-final and the final round. This was the first time this was done in India during a live game and gave a fun and much-needed break to the qualifying team and the casters.
Suhani is one of the first women mentalists and magicians in India. She combines principles of human behavior and psychology with magic to read people’s thoughts and understand how they think.
During the game, Suhani interacted with gamers – Ankit V3nom Panth and Riyan Parag with the popular “Wrong answers only” and concluded her segment with a mentalism session.
Suhani seamlessly integrated the theme of Valorant in her trick. With a sealed envelope visible at all times in the background, she asked Ankit and Riyan to think of a few elements from the game. Names of agents, a score, a map, and a number of ‘kills’. She then asked that they reveal their thoughts to the public. They did. Suhani then opened the envelope lying in the background and et voila! Everything the players had thought of was already in Suhani’s envelope. Best of all, there was even a printout of the map they had imagined.
Ankit and Riyan were so astonished that Suhani had accurately “read their minds” that they got off their seats in disbelief. Riyan said “I have seen this kind of mentalism on America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent, but I have never experienced this in person”. Ankit V3nom Panth was too speechless to react. When he recovered, he said, “This is insane! Hats off to you. We had thought of 2 agent names and both predictions were on point’. To the audience he said, “I promise you all, we didn’t discuss any of this before the act”.
The full video of the session can be watched on Red Bull India’s Instagram handle.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CPlDyAYnhnh/
Red Bull India and OML partnered with Hemkunt Foundation and Give India and encouraged viewers of the stream to donate to these charities for COVID relief across the country.
The finals took place on 29th May on Sky ESports’ YouTube Channel. They had guest appearances from Two-Side Gamers, Dynamo, Mortal, and Xyaa. the stream was hosted by K18 and broadcasted from the Sky Esports Studio in 8 regional languages including Hindi, English, Punjabi, Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada which garnered over 1.82M views.
This was the first time any e-sports tournament was broadcast in 8 languages in India simultaneously.
Villainous – the winning team to represent India with these 5 players – Gaurang Yadav, Meet Patel, Jashan Madan, Vraj Shah and Harsh Yadav will advance to the World Final, where they will face off with other country champions to win €20,000 and a cutting edge gaming hub for their university.
