In the recent Apex Legends Global Series: 2022 Championship, TSM player ImperialHal made headlines when he refused to shoot a player from an opposing team who had disconnected.
In a match during the tournament, one player from team SCARZ was spotted standing away from the action, entirely unmoving. Upon noticing him, ImperialHal told his teammates on TSM not to shoot since he was clearly disconnected or otherwise experiencing trouble.
You can watch the exchange below.
Tournaments like these usually don’t have exact rules for what to do in this situation, so TSM’s sportsmanship caught the attention of viewers who sympathized with the disconnected player. It’s lucky that in this case, the SCARZ player actually was disconnected and not employing a manipulative strategy. Ultimately, TSM and SCARZ were able to proceed to the next round after that day.
The Apex Legends Global Series is more than just a casual tournament, the total prize pool comes out to a whopping 2 million dollars so this good sportsmanship could have potentially cost TSM, literally. This potential cost didn’t go unnoticed and only served to emphasize ImperialHal’s good sportsmanship, despite all of the money on the line.
While I’d like to say this story has a fairy tale ending with one of these two teams taking the whole tournament, neither TSM nor Scarz were in the top 5. TSM went home with a $72,000 prize at 7th place, while SCARZ took home $24,000 in 11th.
DarkZero eSports took the gold and the lion’s share of the prize pool with $500,000.
Apex Legends is a free to play battle royale style game (or “looter shooter” as they’re sometimes called). Players form teams of 3 and drop in with the goal of being the last squad standing.
Apex Legends is available now on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
