The biggest weekend of Starcraft in 2013! (Part 1 of 3)

I've legitimately thought a lot today about writing a post where I do something beyond just talking about E-sports and in particular talk about things happening in my own life. I know it'd be a crazy stretch to do that, especially on my own personal blog, but hear me out! The thought crossed my mind. Thats all it really did though, no talk about me today, on to video games!

Some of you know this weekend as American thanksgiving. While that is certainly true, this year its actually the busiest weekend for StarCraft II. We have 3 separate major tournaments running with the World Cyber Games trying to remain relevant, the Intel Extreme Master's stop in Singapore where Acer.Scarlett will attempt to win her first premier title, and finally we have one of my personal favorites, the Annual awarding Liduid Hero with a check festival Dreamhack Winter. I'll be giving my own brief thoughts on who I think each of these tournaments are going to play out. We'll start with WCG and then talk about real tournaments tomorrow and Thursday. #ShotsFired

First up the World Cyber Games in Kunshan, China. This is going to be a weird tournament, because we have 4 groups of 7-8 players that are all going to play each person in their group in a Bo3 with only the top two of each group advancing. That means over two days, nearly 100 Bo3 series are going to be played. Thats at least 200 games! That is an ungodly number of games, I feel so sorry for both the casters and the players here, it's going to be grueling to say the least. Especially if you lose the first few and are essentially eliminated half way through the day. There are going to be pointless games being played and that just shows that the tournament format is bad. Never the less, out of each group I feel there are 2 favourites to come out of each of them. Group A will have PartinG and Sen completely out classing the rest of their group. Group B might be the closest, but I feel that France's Dayshi and China's Jim will be advancing, (That doesn't mean I won't be cheering for my fellow Canadian Desrow!) Group C will be dominated by Sora with MacSed following behind, with maybe the American Xenocider making an upset. Group D will be Korea's Soulkey wrecking everyone and the German protoss HasuObs picking up the pieces of the wreckage to advance in 2nd.

Into the playoff stage it will become like every other tournament in that the Koreans will likely dominate. I think PartinG looks to be the most likely to take the whole tournament, Soulkey could also take it, don't be shocked if its those two in the finals.

If I can throw some real talk down about now, WCG is a relic and not really that rel event of a tournament anymore. The only part that seems to matter is the Korean Qualifiers, since none of the foreigners (Non-Koreans) that would have had a even play this anymore. It's just like a charity to for the 3 Koreans that make it to the global finals. If your thinking of watching your first StarCraft Tournament this weekend, don't have it be WCG, not while there are two other very high quality tournaments going on at the same time.

RIP on WCG. Plz. 

Source of picture World Cyper Games. Plz don't sue me.