The Inaugural Wilhelm eHockey Tour Dubbed Success - HC Raitti Crowned Champions

The long virtual hockey spring came to a conclusion in mid-July at the inaugural Wilhelm eHockey Tour Finals at Narinkkatori in Helsinki. The event was a celebration of hockey in all forms, featuring both the eHockey Tour Finals and the ECL '22 Spring Finals on consecutive nights. 

The inaugural Wilhelm eHockey Tour was a success and received positive feedback from participating teams and players. The Finals event hosted at Narinkkatori in Helsinki suffered slightly from exposure to the elements, but despite the unorthodox fashion of being outside, the setup received lots of praise. With the setups in order, players had an easy time enjoying their games and elevating their performance level once the nerves had worn off in the beginning. 

The tour that started in April consisted of nine online city tournaments allowing teams to qualify for the Top 32-playoffs by finishing in the top three or gaining enough ranking points. Finally, the eight best teams met for the Quarterfinals at the live event in Helsinki.

For most of the players at the event, it was the first time playing live and surely the first time in a setting like that. Understandably there were some nerves at the beginning, but as stated, the performance level started elevating once the players got over that initial nervosity. For the casual gamer, 3's might seem like all fun and games with no real structure to the game, but the top eight teams at the event surely proved that a lot of hours had been put into their game at the practice rink. 

The one team that finally came out on top after a long day of gaming was HC Raitti, represented by Roni @Vatanenn__ Kärkkäinen, Hiski @Tumuttaja(xHise-) Rytkönen and Roope @xxAhti Kärkkäinen. The group of friends hailing from Kiuruvesi paved their way to the playoffs by winning the Kuopio city tournament in dominant fashion and continuing on that same path through the playoffs. Throughout the eHockey Tour, the team only suffered one loss in total, which came in the finals against their very tough adversary Lemmenvelhot. 

"Especially playing live was a new and exciting experience for us, since none of us have done anything like that before. However, the nerves wore off quickly after the first games. Overall the experience at the Finals was excellent and everything was handled very well. We were quite confident from the start due to the chemistry we've got in our team and a bit of an unorthodox playstyle that turned out to be challenging for the opponents. Hopefully we'll be able to ride on this momentum and continue into the 6v6 game on the ECL side in the future", says key player @Tumuttaja about their experience at the eHockey Tour.

We're very grateful for all the feedback from players and viewers at the event, but would like to hear your thoughts even more! Please share your ideas in the comments section, in the eHockey tour Discord channel and we'd also appreciate it if you took a minute to fill in this feedback survey. Let's all work towards an even better experience next year!