At times like this I ponder where my life would be had I devoted more time to playing video games. Not the sort of thing you read every day, but then again, it's not every day you can win a quarter of a million dollars just from playing a game. That's exactly what happened to Justin Chavarria of Eugene, Oregon, who is the winner of MLB 2K13's Perfect Game Challenge.
Chavarria was the winner out of four finalists to compete in a single-elimination tournament at the T-Mobile All-Star FanFest in New York City. With the Texas Rangers, Chavarria took on Brad Holland's Oakland A's to win $250,000.
"This has been a life-changing experience over the last four months," said Chavarria. "I had a great time competing against the other three finalists during the tournament, and this is a day I'll never forget."
This year's MLB 2K13 Perfect Game Challenge contained 30 $25,000 MLB Team Leaderboard prize pools, one per MLB team, for a total of $750,000. To be considered for a perfect game, the players had to use a single pitcher to strikeout at least 27 batters
Since the game released and the contest began in March, more than 785,000 perfect game attempts were logged, but only a shade over 2,500 perfect games were verified. In the end, four finalists were determined by a dynamic leaderboard ranking. 2K Sports created an algorithm to determine who pitched the "best" perfect game based on strength of schedule, number of pitches, and other stats for last year's tournament.
According to Take-Two, last year's Perfect Game Challenge had a record number of participants, with nearly 1 million attempts made and more than 1,000 perfect games pitched by gamers. This year's contest featured a bit of an overhaul after last year's tournament was deemed unfair by contestants, due to an exploitable loophole in the contest rules.
According to the rules from last year's contest, substitutions were not allowed, and real-world batting lineups had to be used for the team the pitcher was throwing against. However, an exploit ws discovered where a gamer could make substitutions in the opposing team's lineup.