Esports | PUBG MOBILE | IHC Esports — The 142-Point World Final at Ülker Sports Arena

On December 10, 2023, the PUBG MOBILE Global Championship reached its final match inside Ülker Sports and Event Hall in Istanbul. Sixteen teams had played across three days at the arena, and Mongolia’s IHC Esports moved into first place only after the eighteenth and last round.

This was the global PUBG MOBILE app on Version 2.9, released November 7 during the championship season—not PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS on PC or console, India’s BGMI, or China’s Game for Peace. The publisher-sanctioned PMGC was administered by Level Infinite, KRAFTON, and VSPO; the public event record does not identify a mandatory handset model, so none is inferred here.

Each match sent four-player squads onto a battle-royale map to find weapons and supplies while a shrinking safe zone forced surviving teams together. One elimination earned one point, while finishing first through eighth awarded 10, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and 1 placement points respectively; the championship went to the team with the highest total across all eighteen matches rather than the winner of a single game.

IHC’s playing quartet was Khuselbaatar “Alex” Khatanbaatar, Bilguun “Godless” Baatarkhuu, Zolboot “Zyol” Bayartsengel, and Batbagana “DEMO” Batkhuyag, with Dulaanjargal “Abely” Nyamlkhagva coaching. The team stood sixth after day one, climbed to third after day two, and entered the closing stages of the last match separated from its nearest rivals by only a few points.

IHC had won Round 15 on Erangel, its only first-place finish of the Grand Finals, but eliminations supplied most of its championship total. The final table recorded 110 elimination points and 32 placement points for 142 overall, four ahead of Stalwart Esports and eleven ahead of Alpha7 Esports.

That distribution is the central fact of the result: IHC did not need the most Chicken Dinners because consistent fighting produced the tournament’s largest elimination total. Zyol received the Finals MVP and Gunslinger awards, while IHC became the first Mongolian team to win the PUBG MOBILE Global Championship and earned $453,500 from the event’s $3 million prize pool.

Sources: PUBG MOBILE’s official championship release (https://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/swipe-right/pressreleases/ihc-esports-win-2023-pubg-mobile-global-championship-3292289); official Version 2.9 announcement (https://www.pubgmobile.com/en-US/news-detail.shtml?content_id=6ee0f369a8768a49fcab8e1aab1f17fab669); official competition rules (https://esports.pubgmobile.com/static/doc/Competition_Rulebook_PUBGM.pdf); Field Level Media’s independent report (https://fieldlevelmedia.com/esports/ihc-esports-prevails-at-pubg-mobile-global-championship/); Esports Charts’ independent recap (https://escharts.com/news/pmgc-2023-recap).

Cover photograph: “The Ülker Sports Arena under construction” by David Jones, photographed September 22, 2011, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TheÜlkerSportsArenaunderconstruction.jpg; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).