SC2 today: The western world debuts in Proleague 13-14

The rebranded HomeStory Cup, organized by Dennis “Take” Gehlen, is ready for its return on March 7-9, now with a new sponsor in NEEDforSEAT and with a new name – SeatStory Cup.

The official tournament announcement from last week spoke of a multi-discipline event, featuring not only StarCraft 2 but Hearthstone as well. To accommodate for this change, the SC 2 player pool was cut in half (now with 16 players only instead of 32) and with that one whole group stage has been omitted.

Today, Take revealed the pairings for the Ro16. What’ll be a tournament very poor on Korean presence – the only three Korean players invited are HyuN , MC and Jjakji – is set to begin this Friday in the CET afternoon with Group A, featuring Socke, HyuN, Demuslim and Snute. The event is set to end on Sunday evening when the champion will bank $8,000 of the $15,000 total prize pool.

Source: Take.tv

Proleague 13-14 finally sees a foreign presence. After the previous season welcomed names like Stephano, HuK (as part of EG-TL) and Major (Team 8), it is Ryan “State” Visbeck who becomes the first westerner to play a televised Proleague match for the new season.

Visbeck spent the last six months as a part of ROOT Gaming but he decided to leave Catz’s team in February this year to live and train in Korea and try to qualify for GSL. While the 

latter did not end with a success, State eventually managed to secure himself a spot in one of the oldest Korean pro-teams, that of Prime and on February 20th it was revealed that the American Protoss will be part of white jerseys’ roster for Proleague.

Today, State got to play his first televised Proleague game against SKT’s Classic. The game ended in Korean’s favor after Visbeck was outplayed on Sejong Station and aided in SKT’s final 3-2 victory over Prime.

Complexity Gaming’s CEO Jason Lake spoke to eSportsMax shortly after his organization expanded by adding two League of Legends teams, the NACL competitors Skyline and Determined Gaming (now known as coL.Red and coL.Black, respectively). Apart from the LoL talks and the mention of “keeping [their] eyes on Dota 2”, Lake took the time to answer the question of why did the organization drop their academy squad in January this year.

“I applaud any efforts to develop the grass roots aspect of SC2 but I don’t think 1-2 MLG’s a year will accomplish that without additional competitive events,” writes Lake. He proceeds to further comment on the shrinking NA StarCraft 2 scene by saying that the amount of 

The foreign resistance in WCS Europe was strong last night as TLO and Grubby managed to conquer Group F in the Ro32 to eliminated Genius and Kas, who finished 3^rd and 4^th, respectively.

TLO was the first to get out of the group, pinning a 4-1 score against Grubby and the lone Korean, becoming the fourth foreigner to top a group in the Ro32. The Dutch superstar followed him shorty, recovering against Kas and Genius in the losers and deciding match.

Genius’ elimination is the second hit that the Korean presence in the tournament is taking after ForGG finished last in a group of Vortix, BabyKnight and Lilbow. South Korea will send at least four names to the Ro16, however, as MC, Jjakji, San and StarDust are already through with the possibility to be joined by Mvp and MMA by the end of the week.