Shares of gaming technology provider Playtech (LSE:PTEC) plunged 20.67 percent today on volume that was more than triple the daily average. That’s after JKO Play Ltd. withdrew a $2.9 billion takeover offer. JKO Play is led by former Formula One team owner Eddie Jordan and Keith O’Laughlin, previously an executive at Scientific Games (NASDAQ:SGMS). Various […]

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The first two rounds of racing in the F1 Esports Series Challengers are in the history books, with our three groups of talented turning laps in anger for the first time.

Held across January-March, this six event, 12 race series will separate the great from the sublime, and offer us 18 incredible drivers to bring to the Pro Exhibition later this year. Here’s what went down in the first event!

XBOX ACTION

First up in the week’s trio of Challengers streams came the Xbox qualifiers. This group represented the fastest participants of the in-game events in October and November 2021, and the group of 16 assembled at Shanghai International Circuit, China.

Tom Manley put it on pole in the first race, but it was the pair behind him that caught the eye. A scintillating first-lap fight between Zak Oates and Ryan Jacobs for second pace saw half a lap of wheel-to-wheel racing. Oates ended up leading the race after the pit stop phase, but a penalty incurred during his pit stop dropped him well down the order, and out of the points. Manley led them home, with Jacobs second, and Sam McLean in third.

Lewis Groombridge took pole for the second race in Bahrain, but wasn’t able to capitalise, and instead it was Manley – who qualified a lowly P11 – who took the secondd win, using a brilliant alternate strategy to carve his way through the pack, making his move on the very last lap with superior grip. Jed Norgrove grabbed second after missing out in the first race, with Zak Oates third, after similarly missing out in China. With a near-perfect start, Manley sits on top of the standings with 50 points, ahead of McLean on 27, with Norgrove and Jacobs joined in fourth with 18 points.

PLAYSTATION RACES

Wednesday heralded the turn of the PS4 and PS5 racers, and Matthew Alder was the man in form in the first race in China. The 16-year-old put it on pole in Shanghai, and only lost the lead during the pits stop phase. Georges Nader and Duncan Hofland kept the pressure on behind in a major way, but they finished in that order to take the first podium of PlayStation Challengers 2022.

The second race in Bahrain provided heaps of entertainment from the off, with Dutchman Joost Nordijk taking pole position. He went largely unchallenged in the early stages, but there was plenty of action elsewhere. Lap 7 saw China race-winner Alder attack Marcel Altstadt, but they pair collided at Turn 1; the latter spinning, and the former falling out of the points late on.

With just a few laps to go, the race reached boiling point, as Noordijk, Mirko Suriano and Nader went three-wide into Turn 1. Though the circuit is wide, it wasn’t wide enough for all of them, and Nader spun after contact between the trio, dropping back and eventually retiring. Suriano defended from Noordijk, but it was no use, and the polesitter was back in front, taking the lead on the final lap. Copying his China form, Duncan Hofland completed the podium in third.

The results put Suriano and Hofland join on top of the standings with 30 points apiece, ahead of race winners Noordijk (28) and Alder (25).

PC DRAMA

As with the other two platforms, China was the first event, with plenty of familiar names among the grid. Tomek Poradzisz was the man to beat in qualifying, taking pole in Shanghai. He didn’t waste time in the racing, crushing the opposition with a winning margin of more than seven seconds – a lightyear in F1 Esports terms! Ulas Ozyildirim and Szelle Kristof completed the podium.

As night fell in Bahrain, John Evans was the man on pole, and he put up a hell of a fight, leading most of the race under the floodlights. As with many other races, Samuel Bean left it late to strike, and blasted past for the lead on the final lap, with a daring pass late on the brakes at Turn 1. Wilson Hughes completed the podium, with former F1 Esports Pro Series racer Floris Wijers close behind in fourth.

With that dominant win in the first race, Poradzisz leads the championship on 33 points, ahead of Bean in second on 27, and Ozyildirim third with 24.

The next Challengers streams will be coming your way in a matter of days, with Xbox, PlayStation and PC all back in action on February 1-3. See you there!

The post F1 Esports Series Challengers 2022: Event 1 Round-up! appeared first on F1Esports News.

We won’t see the Frecce Tricolori or Red Arrows flying over the tracks during pre-race displays because they pollute the air. Beginning in 2022, the Grand Prix organisers will no longer be able to use [...]

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The best couch co-op or online co-op on PlayStation 5.

What are the best PS5 co-op games? Which PS5 games should you play for some co-op action with your buddies? While singleplayer experiences can be great, sometimes you can't beat a bit of co-op with friends. Whether you're looking for local co-op or online co-op games, there are a good amount of cooperative titles on PS5. In this list, we've gathered together what we think are the best co-op games on PS5. If you're looking for more competitive experiences, check out our guides to the Best PS5 Local Multiplayer Games and Best PS5 Online Multiplayer Games through the links. Read up on the Best PS5 Games overall, while you're at it.

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The Grid Legends system requirements may surprise you with how forgiving they are, as now decade old Intel and AMD CPUs are more than enough to get you on to the starting grid. That said, the game will undoubtedly still tap into the greater available horsepower found in gaming PC hardware, like the best graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia. Codemasters has revealed that Grid Legends uses the EGO Engine 4.0, the same engine it uses to power its annual F1 videogames. This means it's possible we could see an implementation of ray traced reflections and shadows, as previously seen in F1 2021. Of course, you'll need a compatible GeForce RTX or Radeon RX GPU to enjoy these major graphical improvements. Ray tracing tends to have a dramatic impact on performance, so we hope that Codemasters will also carry across support for Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR. These upscaling technologies are an easy way to boost fps, but your mileage may vary in pushing frame rates as high as your speedometer.

Challengers is BACK for another year! The dust has only just begun to settle on the 2021 F1 Esports Series Pro Championship presented by Aramco. But while that may still be fresh in the memory, we’re already looking for fresh talented racers in 2022.

So what is the Challengers? Don’t worry – we’ve got everything you need to know right here! Essentially, Challengers is the second step on the journey to becoming an official F1 Esports Series racer. The first step was the qualifying events held on F1 2021 back in October and November, and now we have the very best qualifiers ready to race one another.

Groups of racers on PC, Xbox and PlayStation devices will contest a 12-race championship in the early months of 2022. After 12 races, the six drivers with the most points on each platform will progress to the Pro Exhibition. From there, they’ll be pushed to the absolute limit, with the 10 official F1 Esports teams able to pick the most talented drivers for their official 2022 roster.

CHALLENGERS FORMAT

Each event of the Challengers will consist of two 25% races per console, running on consecutive days. So to kick off, our first week of action will see the Xbox racers battle on January 18, with PlayStation and PC players following suit the next two days.

Six events will run every fortnight from January 18 until the end of March, at which point we’ll separate the good from the great. The six finest racer from each group will then progress to the Pro Exhibition.

These streams will all be taking place live on Twitch and Huya from 19:00 GMT, so you can follow the action as it goes along! Who knows, we might just unearth our latest superstar!

The post F1 Esports Series Challengers is Back for 2022! appeared first on F1Esports News.

This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon. Introduction As a part of writing a blog on the ML or DS topic, I selected a problem statement from Kaggle which is Microsoft malware detection. Here this blog explains how to solve the problem from scratch. In this blog I will explain to […]

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As an advocate of the metaverse, the exchange expressed that it is “excited to support” this side of the industry.

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With every passing day, you hear of a new brand climbing onto the NFT bandwagon. To name a few; big names like Nike, Louis Vuitton, [...]

Sony revealed the top downloaded games of 2021 from its PlayStation store in a blog post published Wednesday.

Using one or two performance metrics seems sufficient to claim that your ML model is good — chances are that it’s not.

Frontier’s first Formula 1 management sim is will release this calendar year, the Elite Dangerous and Planet Zoo developer has confirmed. Giving an update for the first half of the financial year, Frontier revealed that they have high hopes for this new annual franchise for the management game experts. “We are very well positioned for the future,” they write. “This calendar year will see us enter the incredible world of Formula 1 – a truly global sport – with the first release for our annual F1 management game franchise.” Little is known about the F1 game at this time, but Frontier first announced that they were working on this project in March 2020. We have to expect that they will reveal the title in the coming months as interest in the sport builds in the run up to the start of the 2022 season in March and the massively different regulations that will transform what the cars look like and how they perform. However, the game will launch in the next financial year which, for Frontier, starts in June 2022. In some ways they will be going toe-to-toe with the next F1 game from Codemasters, which typically releases around the British Grand Prix in July. The last few years has seen Codemasters beef up their career mode  to include more and more team-management elements, though we obviously expect that Frontier can put a lot more detail and nuance into a dedicated management sim. See our F1 2021 review here. The financial update was not all positive. Jurassic World Evolution 2 is at ‘nearly’ 1 million units sold since November, with the game’s prospects dented somewhat by not being able to release around the same time as the postponed Jurassic World Dominion film release – they’re hoping for a bump in interest when that does release later this year. Similarly, while revenues rose by 33%, the company was working with lower margins and posted an operating loss as they have expanded significantly over the past few years. Two games are expected to release in the next six months – FAR: Changing Tides and Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters – both from the Frontier Foundry publishing arm, but revenue guidance has been reduced for the remainder of this year and the next, leading to a 255 drop in share prices. Furthermore, their Warhammer: Age of Sigmar real-time strategy game that was planned for release in 2023 has now slipped to the first half of 2024. Source: Frontier