The first round of the Starcraft 2 WCS Global Finals has concluded

This past weekend, the best Starcraft 2 players in the world were pitted against each other in the first round of the World Championship Series Global Finals. The first round matches were all best of 5 and decided which of the sixteen players would get to advance to the next stage of the championship, the quarter-finals. The eight remaining players will have to duke it out next weekend during November 7-9 at BlizzCon 2014, which takes place in Anahaiem California. This year’s edition of the annual event will be a very special one and will feature various announcements, competitions, contests, and even a Metallica concert to top it all off. Aside from the Starcraft 2 championship, BlizzCon will also host the final stages of the Hearthstone and World of Warcraft tournaments.

But we’ll talk some more about that another time, so let’s just get back to Starcraft 2 for now. As I mentioned a few days ago, all sixteen players that have qualified to the Global Finals were Korean, with six of them being Protoss, six Terran and only four Zerg. Well, the racial distribution has changed quite a bit following the first round of the global finals as only one Zerg player remained in the form of Life who qualified by defeating Zest with 3-2. Meanwhile, the Terran race now has four representatives remaining (Bomber, MMA, TaeJa. and INnoVation) while the Protoss can account for three (herO, Classic, and San). Although the Terrans are the most numerous at the moment, no more than two of them will get to qualify to the semi-finals of the Stacraft 2 World Championship Series.

The first quarter-final will have two Terrans going head-to-head as the current number one player in the world (as far as WCS points are concerned at least) Bomber will face off against MMA. It seems like a deja-vu given that Bomber and MMA also battled in the first round of the global finals at WCS 2013. Bomber won 3-2 back then, but can he repeat that performance? We’ll just have to wait and see. As for the rest of the quarter-finals, they are as follows: herO vs Classic (PvP), San vs Life (PvZ), and Taeja vs INnoVation (TvT). We’re definitely going to see some great Stacraft 2 next weekend, although there will be a few big names that unfortunately didn’t make it to the next stage. Notable mentions include lasts year’s WCS runner-up Jaedong and HyuN who is considered to be one of the best Starcraft 2 players in the world at the moment. Both of them lost in the first round this past weekend.