I have been trying to get into watching esports and competitive
gaming but am not really interested in MOBAs. Are there any tournaments or
events you would recommend. Recently I have been watching Planetside 2 server
smash matches which are surprisingly tactical while looking like a Michael Bay
film.
ESL One Cologne is coming up soon! Look it up.
It's a CS:GO major (biggest CS tournaments, 3 of them a year). It's gonna be great. The competition at the top level of the game right now is golden.
If you're looking to get into the game, hit me up mate, I'll play some with you and show you the basics to get started in competitive match making.
Watching competitive Quake is quite exciting. The VODs for this year's quakecon should be up. Some of the players in Quake that I enjoy watching are Cypher, Rapha, Cooller, evil and Av3k.
If you like Halo.. maybe competitive Halo (HCS) would be of interest. Especially once halo 5 drops there are going to be many improvements that make competitive coverage much better for the viewers/casters. Here is a link to some gamescom gameplay from pro teams if you are interested in it. https://youtu.be/XvJnxUN09t8?t=4m40s
StarCraft 2 is usually a decent watch if there's a good commentator. I think GSL season 3 is going on right now:
You can see stuff from previous days here:
I occasionally watch WCS America stuff here (I think WCS starts back up on the 13th):
http://www.twitch.tv/ wcs_america/
And they have their previous broadcasts up for free here
http://www.twitch.tv/ wcs_america/profile/past_broadcasts
And you can find standard daily streams/casts here: http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/ or you can search twitch.
edit: the links to twitch were messed up, so I added a space to each one.