With a prize pool of $150,000 at stake, the 16 top-performing players from the Korean, European, and North American divisions of the StarCraft 2 World Championship Series meet this week in Seoul for the Season 1 championship. The group stage begins tonight at 2 AM UK / 9 PM Eastern, with Stephano, Soulkey, TLO, and aLive leading off in Group A, while Alicia, Ryung, Mvp, and KangHo compete in Group B. The overall winner of the tournament will take home $40,000. You can watch the stream over at the WCS website.
Unsurprisingly, only a handful of European Zergs will be representing the rest of the StarCraft-playing world outside of Korea. DIMAGA, Stephano, and TLO are the only non-Korean players to win through the hotly-contested European division, while North America will be represented by five Koreans: Team Liquid’s HerO, Axiom’s Alicia and Ryung, and Evil Geniuses’ aLive and and Revival. America may not yet be able to field a world-championship caliber StarCraft pro, but its teams sure can hire some.
There is another imbalance evident in lineup for the championship: the Protoss can boast only three players in the round of 16, while the Terrans claim five and the Zerg have eight. Blizzard are working on a solution, if there is in fact a problem, but for now it’s down to HerO, Alica, and sOs to show what they can do with Heart of the Swarm Protoss.
You can find the full schedule for the WCS finals here, and as usual it means some late nights (or very early mornings) for fans in Europe. It should be a great broadcast, however, with production coming from the seasoned hands at Korea’s OnGameNet, with English-language casting from DoA, MonteCristo, Apollo, and Day[9]. Although the last time I watched OGN’s Proleague, their English-language casters were very rough in their delivery, so hopefully they’ve stepped-up their game in the intervening months.