This year’s Hearthstone World Championship is coming up soon – or rather, its conclusion. In mid-December, between the 12th and the 14th, Hearthstone players from around the world will duel for the title of World champ… and for their part of the half-million-dollar prize pool. As an added incentive, the winner of the World Championship will also have a card named or designed in their honour.
The winner of the competition will receive a whopping $200.000. Second and third place will receive $100.000 and $50.000 respectively. The event will be held online – but that won’t make it any less exciting than the usual format!
If you are interested in esports betting, find out which are the best esports bookmakers for your Hearthstone bets.
The competitors
So far, only four players have qualified for the event – Brian “Bloodyface” Eason, Sato “Glory” Kenta, Vladislav “SilverName” Sinotov, and Fan “iG.Syf” Yilun. For many, this was a little surprising already – last year’s champion has not yet qualified (and might not qualify at all). Li “VKLiooon” Xiaomeng, a Chinese pro Hearthstone player caused a huge upset when she won last year’s title. She made history in more than one way – not only was she the first female player to win a final at any BlizzCon competition ever, but she also became the first female Hearthstone Grandmaster ever.
This year she hasn’t secured a spot in the finals yet though – and she has just a few weeks left to do so. Four more seats are up for grabs and they will be filled with players that are competing in Season 2 which will be concluding on October 11th.
The eight lucky players will be competing in the Finals in December. You can watch the competition by checking out either the official Hearthstone YouTube channel or the playhearthstone.com website if you prefer.
The competition
The initial seedings will have two groups with four players competing each. Two season one players are matched with two season two players – in the first group, it’s the season one America player versus the season two China player, and the season one Asia/Pacific seed against season two Europe’s player.
Group two has season one’s China player going up against season two’s Asia/Pacific player and season one’s Europe player competing with the season two Americas’ player. After four of these 8 are eliminated on day 1, the second day will see the top players of both groups competing against each other to determine the overall champ.
Unlike previous years’ competitions, the event will take place entirely online – where usually these competitions end at the yearly BlizzCon event, this year fans will have to make do without. The BlizzCon event was cancelled entirely earlier this year, forcing all competitions taking place there to move to online instead.
Blizzard is organising a series of online events including replacements for the cosplay exhibition, cosplay contest, art contest, march of the murlocs and several more. For the last event, wannabe participants need to submit a video of themselves marching as a murloc! It’s a fun way of making up for the lost event – lets hope that the streams of the Hearthstone Finals makes up for the missed event as well!
