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It might not be an Olympic sport, but an event in Santa Monica happening quietly for years would overflow SoFi Stadium.
A grassroots community event in the game “World of Warcraft,” the Race to World First is more of a marathon, sometimes lasting over a month.
Liquid Guild — led by Max “Maximum” Smith — is tasked to play through the most difficult group content in gaming, he said. They race with other groups to be the first in the world to complete it. On April 6, the L.A.-based team won the worldwidecompetition in stunning fashion.
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“It is the regular season, the Super Bowl and the playoffs all at one time,” Smith, 27, said.
Liquid is the Dodgers of WoW esports. The L.A.-based team has won the last three races in a row, and recently made this month’s competition their fourth. Winning requires not just the 20-man group playing the game — called a raid group — but dozens of analysts and support staff.
There’s no prize pool or gold medal to be won. In this race, a team of esports athletes stare forward at a screen instead of the starting line. Without each other, there’s no hope of winning.
Team Liquid members Josh “Imfiredup” Heiner, left, Brandyn “Hopeful” Hahn and Kevin “THD” Arean play “World of Warcraft” during the Race to World First at the Team Liquid Alienware Facility on March 26 in Santa Monica.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Smith’s guild contracted with Team Liquid, an esports company, in 2021. They bring players from across the country to play from the Alienware Training Facility in Santa Monica around six to nine months, depending on when new game content is released.
The race turns an ordinary office into an otherworldly production space.
Dozens of computer setups line several rooms inside. Players only stop their 14-hour days to use the bathroom, eat and sleep. Even those breaks are all coordinated.
The race is a full-time job for about 60 people for at least a month, if not longer. Players have been preparing for weeks, working with fans to funnel powerful items into their characters.
“It’s one of the few sports or esports where the community actively feels involved in helping prepare the team to compete,” Smith said. He acts as an eagle eye, not playing the game himself, but watching and strategizing to give them the best chance.
Most of the 20-man roster are fighting one of the raid tier’s nine bosses — powerful monsters that act as roadblocks they must defeat to finish the race — and are too busy to be interviewed.
They must kill each of the nine “Mythic” difficulty bosses at least once to win. Each boss, which gets progressively harder, presents a strategic challenge that Liquid must create answers for.
Raiders have to plan and execute pixel-perfect maneuvers to avoid dying, all while playing their characters perfectly. If they don’t, they die and have to start that boss over again.
The hardest bosses kill the guild hundreds of times. They must get up, reload and try again.
During the course of the race, Liquid and other guilds raise tens of thousands of currencyfor charities like UNICEF for Liquid and Games for Love for Echo, a European guild. But the lack of prize pool doesn’t mean they’re throwing away money.
During the last race, Liquid racked up 30 million hours watched across all platforms, Team Liquid co-chief executive Steve Arhancet said.
Sponsors for gamers aren’t lacking, either. Players drink Monster energy drinks instead of sports drinks. They use branded equipment like gaming chairs or pre-built computers instead of specialized shoes.
Team Liquid member Brandyn “Hopeful” Hahn plays “World of Warcraft.”
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Some players have taken their shoes off. A growing stack of empty energy drink cans sit on the livestream set’s mantle. Laundry bags around the room are proof they’ve been here for almost a week.
There is laughter and coarse language expected of a large group of men in their 20s and 30s, but mostly quiet focus. A staffer shushes the Times journalists talking in the hallway. They shouldn’t be distracted.
In this world, a player like Omeed “Atlas” Atlaschi, 31, is a microbiologist in Orange County by day, and an elite gamer by night.
During the race, he is a champion of the fictional planet Azeroth.
“We are basically playing for bragging rights. We take a lot of pride in it. Saying you’re the best in the world is really something,” Atlaschi said.
Many of his guildmates stream the game for a living and have played for over a decade. Others, like Atlaschi, who has played since he was 10, maintain their day jobs. His love for the game and his friends keeps him playing.
It takes dedication, problem-solving skills and a lot of free time to be one of the best “WoW” players in the world, he said. But having their tight-knit group in the same building raises morale, even after weeks of play.
Raiders kill the fifth boss after 52 attempts. There is no celebration. It is just a stepping stone to the real end of the race.
A room over, dozens of production staffers work to upkeep a livestream set where popular “WoW” social media influencers act as play-by-play broadcasters, discussing strategy.
A private chef cooks dinner nearby. Every meal will be prepared for the players so they can stay focused.
There is a method to the madness. Players’ biometric data are tracked alongside their gameplay so performance managers like Nata Hiron can keep track of their peak performance and recovery times.
Players are not allowed to drink caffeine after 3 p.m., and are encouraged to get eight hours of sleep a day to promote better focus, a tactic that viewers often see as a mistake, Smith said.
They’re asking raiders to focus singlemindedly on the game for up to 16 hours a day, a task not many people are up for, Hiron said. “This is something that the average human is not very well equipped to do,” she said.
The same kind of measures are taken across the world at Liquid’s main competitor, Echo Esports, in Cologne, Germany.
In just over a week, Liquid and Echo will be neck and neck, both single percentage points away from winning the title.
Published by Blizzard in 2004 before the firmmerged with Activision and was purchased by Microsoft, “WoW” remains the crown jewel of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre, or MMORPG, where it has been for 22 years.
It’s a pop culture monolith, spawning an Emmy-award winning South Park episode and the Leeroy Jenkins meme.
Few footagegames can match “WoW’s” longevity, and even fewer can still provide meaningful game updates to 9 million players, as per2025 estimates.
It’s a massive resurgence for the game, which dropped to 5.5 million subscriptions in 2015.
As long as there has been “WoW,” there has been a race, Peyton “Tettles” Tettleton, a “WoW” content creator, told The Times. But it’s not always been to this scale.
Team Liquid trophies in a display case while team members play World of Warcraft during the Race to World First (RWF) at the Team Liquid Alienware Facility on Thursday, March 26, 2026, in Santa Monica, CA. The top World of Warcraft guilds around the world including Team Liquid race to be the first to defeat new, highest-difficulty Mythic raid bosses.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
At first, races were done privately, their boss kills posted online after the fact. In 2018, a guild called Method livestreamed its attempts, winning the tier and kickstarting a niche esport they could monetize, Tettleton said.
Liquid — then called Limit — originated as a close-knit group of players looking to challenge themselves, and have stayed that way. They won second place during that race.
They later became the best in the world, and looked to prove it again.
The following weekend, on Easter Sunday, the final boss of the tier — L’ura, a being made of pure light corrupted by the void (although viewers called it a wind chime) — is still alive.
Echo and Liquid, guilds separated by an eight-hour time difference, are attacking the boss at the same time, and both are close to killing it. Concurrent viewers on Echo’s stream reach 170,000.
In a fake-out, L’ura has a secret that activates when it hits 0% health. Liquid reaches the new phase in front of more than 100,000 viewers and believed it had won. Players jumped up to celebrate, realizing seconds later that the fight isn’t over.
The secret nearly allows Echo to win, but the next day in a nail-biting finish, Liquid defeated the last boss after 474 attempts, securing its place as the best guild in the world.
Players and staff alike jumped up and embraced — for the fourth time — to celebrate their win.
“There’s a ton of work that goes into it, but winning certainly goes a long way to justifying how crazy that can be,” Smith said.
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