With the Round-of-8 qualifiers completed, LGD, LGD.CDEC and HGT have qualified for WEC while powerhouses like Invictus Gaming and Vici Gaming fell short.
The Chinese teams got the opportunity to test and showcase their newly acquired rosters in the Chinese qualifiers for the World Esports Championship. In the Round-of-8 qualifiers, LGD and LGD.CDEC continued with their stellar performance to guarantee their qualification, beating some of the best Chinese teams on their way. Meanwhile, HGT found its way to the final slot through the lower bracket on the last day of the qualifiers. The three teams join Newbee, who were directly invited, to complete the 4 Chinese teams participating in the tournament.
With almost all the Chinese teams going through major roster changes as revealed on 26th August, these qualifiers were bound to be interesting. The clear winners were LGD and LGD.CDEC who stormed through the upper bracket confirming their presence at the WEC without dropping a match. HGT was a surprising success story as they took the last slot with consecutive lower bracket wins over Speed.cn and Invictus Gaming on the last day.
With new, untried rosters, and all matches being Best-of-1's, upsets were expected and we were not dissappointed. Vici Gaming's newly acquired star-studded roster faced its second failure of the qualifiers, going down to Invictus Gaming in the lower bracket, after falling to LGD.CDEC in the first round. Invictus Gaming, another powerhouse of the Chinese scene, had a decent run but couldn't get the better of HGT in the final lower bracket match.
The four Chinese teams aforementioned shall join Titan, Cloud9, Na'Vi(who replaced Secret Team) and Evil Genuises for the LAN playoffs from 7th to 9th September. The $168,000 prize pool WEC is the the first major LAN to be played after The International 2014.
