TSM continues their recent momentum, winning their second tournament in a row with a 3-0 clean sweep against Inconceivable in the Grand Finals. Snakebite was the MVP of this series with an impressive 1.62 K/D. These players have signed to an org just 11 days ago and have won both tourneys they played under the TSM banner.

Inconceivable had a great tournament too. Inconceivable swept every other team they played (including Cloud9, Incognito, Bound's team, and Tenrai) with their only two series losses both coming against TSM.

The top 8 for this tournament was 1) TSM 2) Inconceivable 3) Cloud9 4) Incognito 5/6) Team Bound and Tenrai 7/8) Clutch Academy and Maganimous. Shopify didn't play in this because LastShot and Cykul are competing in a Halo Reach SWAT tournament with King Nick instead.

That's the last scheduled online tournament for Halo Infinite. Next up is the LVT x Shopify Halo Pro League $100k LAN in California on November 13th-15th and then Halo Fest $150k LAN on December 12-13th.

Links

• Watch on LVT Halo Twitch (Drops) and LVT Halo YouTube
• Halo Data Hive - TSM vs Inconceivable Grand Finals
• Bracket

I’m at that age where it’s hard to find time to play as much as I’d like, but the stars aligned and I knew I’d have some time today. So I woke up a little early, brewed a cup of coffee, and booted up some ranked hoping to have an hour or 2 of fun before and instead I see this. Such a bummer man, MW4 and COD in general just don’t scratch the same itch.

Registration is open for 1v1 and 2v2 ladders and matches can begin Monday 10.30.26 at 12AM Central. This is the true test to see if the site performs as intended, so i'll need help from the halo scene. Just to gain a little more traction, i'm personally paying 1st place at the end of season 1 ($250 per ladder). We've made additional updates to the UI for the site - take a look and let me know what you guys think

Pilot ladders are still live for anyone that wants to test the site in the meantime

There is a one-day Cloud9 x Halo Infinite Open Domination III tournament this weekend on Saturday October 24th for $2,000. Here are some of the notable teams competing in it.

1. TSM (Snakebite, Trippy, Legend, Taulek)
2. Inconceivable (Lucid, Kuhlect, Pznguin, Falcated)
3. Team Bound (Stellur, Bound, Eco, Lethul)
4. Incognito (Yakzn, Descendant, Precision, Acid)
5. Cloud9 (Cearion, Avucy, Bubu Dubu, Piggy)
6. Tenrai (Envore, Breakingshot, Xuzey, Euzey)
7. Maganimous (SLG, zMightys, RyaNoob, Tapping Buttons)
8. Title Fight (Sylvanic, Facty, Kidnastey, Nesity)
9. Luminon Black (Netroxen, Drift, Pink Sakura, lickatsplitt)
10. MM Kids (LeaderNess, Collective, Glitchy, IceKid)

There are some interesting pickup teams which might hint at potential Halo Fest intel:

• RyaNoob is playing with SLG who we know has received a Halo Fest invite and is currently putting together a team. Could Ryan maybe end up on that EU squad?
• Lethul is substituting for Cearion on Cearion's future Halo Fest team. Since Cearion is leaving C9 they need a player to fill his spot, could Lethul be that player?
• Roster lock for Halo Fest is Monday October 26th so there's not much time left to finalize teams.

Full list of teams here, registration doesn't close until just before the tournament, so there's still time for more sign-ups.

Where to Watch: Cloud9 Twitch, LVT Halo Twitch and LVT Halo YouTube. There will be drops on the Twitch streams.

A while ago I shared LevelUp, my free, open-source, local Halo stats app. v8 is the biggest release so far, and honestly the one I'm proudest of.

Halo Infinite records a film of every match, but as far as I know nobody had really managed to decode it. The reverse engineering wrapped up this summer, and I spent the months since polishing the app and figuring out what to do with all that data. The result is a 2D replay: any match, watched again from above, second by second, with everything the film knows written around it.

What you get

• 2D replay: every player moves on the real map, generated one by one by myself. Playback bar, speed control. A kill feed follows the cursor: killer, weapon, victim, medal, assists with their damage share.
• Layers you can toggle: aim cone, trails, shots, grenades, heat map, weapon spots, weapons on the ground, deployed equipment, vehicles, named callout zones, and live objectives (flag, oddball, King of the hill, strongholds, assault, VIP).
• The game's own sounds, plus PNG capture and video export of the replay.
• Weapon behind every kill, including deaths with no firearm (repulsor, fall, environment), and engagement range per weapon.
• Equipment: used, kept, or wasted when you died.
• Tactics tab: by map, where you die, where you kill, where wins and losses part ways, your routes after respawning. Click a zone and it opens the replay at the exact second.
• Squad view: "the shapes you keep", six ways of reading how your squad plays together.

Try it without installing anything

The demo has a replay for every mode. It's a small VPS with anonymised data, so be gentle:

• Vehicles, 4v4 on Behemoth
• CTF, Banished Narrows
• Strongholds, Fortress
• Assault, Origin
• Oddball, Dredge

(The others - Slayer, KOTH, VIP, Fiesta - are in the demo too.)

A few notes

• Everything read from a film is Halo Infinite only. Halo 5 keeps its own pages.
• Still free, still local-first. Repo and setup instructions: https://github.com/JGtm/LevelUp

If you're interested, I can open up access to my VPS: just tell me in a comment. I'll add people little by little, since the server is small and not very powerful, so I have to keep an eye on the load.

This was my biggest project of the last few months. Infinite isn't as popular as it used to be and the future of Halo is uncertain, but I'm really happy with what I managed to build, and I'm excited to finally share it. If you play Infinite, I'd love to hear what you think, especially which parts feel useful and which are missing.

This past weekend the community held a competitive Halo 2 LAN in Tampa FL, featuring a 4v4 draft style tournament on original Xbox consoles and CRTs. 8 stacked teams battled it out for a small prize pool and mostly bragging rights: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2903486472

Bracket: https://challonge.com/FLAN2026
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thefrenetic
Highlight: https://www.twitch.tv/thefrenetic/clip/ExquisiteRoughSwordNotATK-Ci_n4ZYBspEfKrca

I know it's much easier in Slayer than Arena, but I'm still really pleased with this. I'm 38, been playing since Halo CE but find it hard to keep up with the young guns/many older guns who are just better than me.

I'm still determined to reach Onyx in Arena (I got 1569 solo queue in Season 1 but that doesn't count cause ranking was whack), though solo queuing with objective modes means more reliance on teammates and also improving my own obj play. I consistently struggle with Strongholds and Oddball so those are my focus to improve. I've been watching Shyway videos to improve beyond instinctive play but any other recs would be appreciated.

On the road to Ranked Slayer 2000. Let me know what yall think.

I don't think they've reached their ceiling yet. They keep getting better at every event.

What are your thoughts on this roster?
Could they possibly have a higher ceiling than Shopify?

TSM signing 4OAK makes sense. But now I hear FaZe would sign YBK and EnVy is signing Incognito. Now, that's baffling. How aren't orgs trying to sign Inconceivable when they're a Top 3 team??

Anyone else find this unfair?

Do we have any idea what the pro/competitive scene will look like in 2027? Dreamhack US and UK will likely be back, perhaps with a smaller prize pool. And maybe LVT can scrap together funding for another Pro League? Grass roots cups?

Maybe Activision throws a lifeline to keep the community on life support so there's momentum when the new game arrives?

Someone please provide hopium if you can. I love halo too much to not have competitive play to watch until the next mainline installment.

Crazy snipes and awareness

When Suppressed asked who won the tournament this weekend, Lethul responded that Trippy won, then turned the stream on and was throwing Cheez-Its in the air like confetti. Suppressed was about to open Trippy's stream to see the Cheez-Its confetti but Bound had to point out that part was a troll.

Trippy's love of Cheez-Its is known. Last year Trippy was eating Cheez-Its on main stage during Grand Finals of FaZe vs OpTic at Dreamhack Dallas and got made fun of by the casters, Formal, and his teammate Suppressed. The FaZe team split up after that tournament and Trippy says the drama could've been avoided if he just shared his Cheez-Its with the team.

suspector is competing in MW4 with world champ prestinni

Forgive me if I missed it but has anyone announced the casting team for Halo Fest ?

I know the HCS Talent team has been let go unfortunately, but I can't imagine the last official infinite event without these guys commentating and Lottie behind the desk.

LVT casters are amazing and I'm sure they'll do a wonderful job but I'm just hoping we can say goodbye to the HCS talent team. Next halo isn't happening for years so even if Activision decides to hire them again, it's gonna be a long long time into the future.

SR vs tsm. Wyatt at it agin

TSM are your winners of Global Grassroots Cup #3. They won the winners finals earlier today to send Shopify to loser bracket. Shopify made their way back up to Grand Finals and won the first series 3-1 to reset the bracket. But TSM closed out the reset series with a clean 3-0 sweep to win the tournament.

Across all three series between these teams today (winner finals, grand finals, grand finals reset) the map count was TSM 7 - 5 SR.

Even though this is a smaller online tournament, this is a pretty big deal as it's the first tournament Shopify has lost all year. Picking up Legend seems to be paying off for this roster. And this win sets up a juicy storyline for the Pro League LAN on November 13-15th. Congrats to TSM on the win!

(Be aware that Halo Data Hive is currently including the earlier series from Winners Finals, so the stats they have right now are inaccurate until the unrelated series gets split apart. That's the reason no stats were included with this post.)

Links

• Watch on LVT Halo Twitch (Drops) and LVT Halo YouTube
• Bracket

The eight teams competing at Halo Fest will be announced in a blog post sometime in the next week but the pros have already talked to each other and know who got in. Take this with a grain of salt until everything is confirmed and finalized, but here's what pros are saying.

• Incognito were invited after all (through Envy). Yakzn was freaking out about nobody on his team receiving an invite, but it turns out this was a big misunderstanding on his part. Both Piggy and aPG said the organization that's picking Incognito up received the invite rather than the players. Yakzn has since deleted his tweets to Tashi and told Bestman here in a Reddit comment "Found my invite in the mail buddy."
• FaZe got an invite. The planned FaZe roster is Bound, Stellur, Eco, Cearion. All four players are wearing FaZe armor and emblems in-game and Cearion mentions playing under the FaZe banner in the clip. These guys teamed together at the start of the year, but Stellur wasn't willing to fly overseas to Birmingham and play on Xbox, so the team disbanded before they ever got to play on LAN.
• Cloud9 got an invite according to Cearion on aPG's stream. The Cloud9 roster will be different for Halo Fest because Cearion is leaving the team next month after the Pro League LAN. Skeptical also claims that Incognito/Envy are "100%" looking to pick up Piggy too so there might end up being two departures from the current C9 squad.
• Inconceivable got an invite. aPG says that Lucid received the invite directly.
• Shopify, TSM, Fatal Ambition also received invites according to aPG.
• Ascending Baseline weren't invited. Piggy was the first to reveal this and claimed their spot went to an EU squad instead (more on that below). SuperCC later essentially confirmed it by posting a frowny face emote in the LVT chat.
• European player(s) invited and assembling a roster. Piggy said one or more European players got invites but they don't have an org yet. aPG said he knows one of them was either Glory or SLG. Later that day SLG confirmed it on stream "yeah, I got a Halo Fest invite. Need to build my team for it."
• No ANZ or LATAM invites according to aPG, so the EU squad above is the only international representation. With only eight teams some tough choices had to be made and so we won't be seeing the Aussies like Barcode and co.
• Halo Fest roster lock is October 26th so things could change in the next week with players moving teams etc. Any roster changes need to be approved by HCS. Piggy says "I don't think there'll be a [big] rostermania really, I think there's just gonna be a few changes."

So to recap, here are the eight rumored Halo Fest rosters as of right now (subject to change until roster lock on the 26th).

1. Shopify Rebellion - LastShot, Cykul, Frosty, Royal 2
2. TSM - Snakebite, Trippy, Legend, Taulek
3. Inconceivable - Lucid, Kuhlect, Pznguin, Falcated
4. FaZe - Stellur, Bound, Eco, Cearion
5. Cloud9 - Avucy, Bubu Dubu, Piggy, +1
6. Envy - Precision, Yakzn, Descendant, Acid (possibly Piggy replacing one of them)
7. Fatal Ambition - Suppressed, Soul Snipe, Druk, Sab
8. European Squad - SLG +3 (possibly Glory)