MLG have released a schedule for Major League Gaming vs. Proleague Invitational (MvP Invitational) and put spectator passes on sale for $10. The international tournament, which pits MLG veterans from Korea, Europe, and North America against the best of the Korean eSports Association’s storied Proleague, begins on Thursday night at 12 AM BST / 7 PM Eastern and runs through October.
A lot of details have yet to be released, including the grand prize, but the total prize pool is $10,000 and the top eight finalists will receive invitations to MLG’s Fall Championship in Dallas this November.
The tournament’s real significance, however, is that how it begins “to further bridge the Western and Korean StarCraft worlds,” as MLG CEO Sundance DiGiovanni said a couple weeks ago. KeSPA’s Proleague was the heart of the Brood War competitive scene and is home to many of the greatest pro StarCraft players in the world, and the MvP Invitational is an early look at how two very different pro communities compare to one another.
It also marks another step by MLG toward the kind of regular programming that is the hallmark of the Korean competitive scene. Proleague and GSL have regular scheduled matches instead of huge, intensive weekend-long tournaments, and that difference can have huge implications for how players approach their games. Winning an MLG or DreamHack event can be a test of physical and mental endurance, very different from the Korean leagues’ more sporadic schedule.
Most MvP matches will air on Mondays and Fridays, and the only way to watch live or recorded games will be via MLG’s $10 pass, which gets you access to the full tournament in 1080p HD and casting by Alex “Axeltoss” Rodriguez and Nick “Axslav” Ranish.