Watching Starcraft 2 at a bar made Wall Street Journal headline

One Sunday afternoon last month, a hundred boisterous patrons crowded into Mad Dog in the Fog, a British sports bar here, to watch a live broadcast.

Half the flat-screen TVs were tuned to a blood-filled match between two Korean competitors, "MC" and "Puma." The crowd erupted in chants of "M-C! M-C!" when the favorite started a comeback.

The pub is known for showing European soccer and other sports, but Puma and MC aren't athletes. They are 20-year-old professional videogame players who were leading computerized armies of humans and aliens in a science-fiction war game called "Starcraft II" from a Los Angeles convention center. The Koreans were fighting over a tournament prize of $50,000.

This summer, "Starcraft II" has become the newest barroom spectator sport. Fans organize so-called Barcraft events, taking over pubs and bistros from Honolulu to Florida and switching big-screen TV sets to Internet broadcasts of professional game matches happening often thousands of miles away.

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