The Starcraft 2 WCS Global Finals are almost here

The third edition of the World Championship Series is approaching its climax as the Global Finals are scheduled to begin on November 1st. WCS is an annual event comprised of a series of tournaments for games such as Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft and Hearthstone. It’s no coincidence that all these are Blizzard titles as the company itself is hosting the competition and has been doing so ever since 2012. The regional qualifiers for the WCS 2014 Starcraft 2 tournament began earlier this year and concluded a couple of weeks ago, so now everybody is waiting for the next stage which comes in the form of the aforementioned Global Finals. Unsurprisingly, all 16 players who managed to qualify for the Global Finals are Korean.

Props to Snute for almost being the only foreigner to make it in the finals though, but unfortunately he only managed to gather enough WCS points for a 17th place. Close, but no cigar. In any case, the 16 players who did manage to qualify are needless to say some of the best Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm players around, although there are some big names missing from the top 16 like HerO, viOlet, and Flash to mention just a few. While all qualified players are most certainly Korean, only six of them have actually qualified from the Korea region, namely Zest, SoO, herO, Classic, Life, and INnoVation. Bomber, HyuN, Polt, TaeJa and Jaedong all qualified from the America region while MC, San, StarDust, MMA, and jjakji came from the Europe region. As for the race distribution at this year’s WCS, things are more or less balanced with six Protoss, six Terrans and four Zerg. Some people might argue that there aren’t enough Zerg, but the distribution is still better than what we saw at many other Starcraft 2 competitions in the past.

The WCS 2014 Global Finals matches will begin this Saturday, November 1st, but we’ll have to wait until November 9th to find out who will be crowned Starcraft 2 champion and get to take home the grand prize. The quarter-finals and semi-finals will take place live during BlizzCon 2014, which takes place between November 7-8, with the grand final scheduled to begin the next day. The total prize pool for the Starcraft 2 2014 World Championship Series is $1.6 million, just like last year.