For many of the invited players to the ESL Legendary Series Katowice bracket, the evening of March 3rd wasn’t a pleasant one and the majority are out of the race for the $30,000.
With the announcement if its massive five-figure prize pool, ESL Katowice easily became one of the most anticipated tournaments for next month. Eight players would be flown to Spodek Arena in the esports heart of Poland, vying for $13,000 of first place prize money in the highest-paying western tournament in Hearthstone bar the World Championship. 100 BlizzCon Championship points were also on the line and many could argue that the prized currency is even more valuable than the hard cash.
As required by the World Championship rules, ESL set up a 16-man tournament with a mix of established names and open qualifier stars. Heavy hitters like 2014 player of the year Aleksandr “Kolento” Malsh, GosuRankings world #1 Cong “StrifeCro” Shu and world champion James “Firebat” Kostesich among others were seeded into the bracket based on merit where they awaited for the up-and-comers to arrive.
As every seeded player was paired with an open qualifier winner, classic David versus Goliath storylines were to be written in the opening day. And in five of the eight matches played last night, the Goliaths lay defeated.
Arguably, the most surprising eliminations were those of Firebat and StrifeCro. The world champion’s record has been on a downhill recently, facing round one eliminations in HearthStats League and Kinguin Spring and his latest loss to Danish player Inderen toppled him from the world top three. StrifeCro, on the other hand, had to face GosuGamers’ own writer Kristjan “SirKristjan” Atli, a battle which ended in a blink as the colossus fell to an aggro trio of Face Hunter, Mech Shaman and Mech Mage.
Another notable upset was the elimination of Kolento, though he arguably got the toughest draw from all the open qualifier winners. The Ukrainian met the new king of open tournaments Jon “Orange” Westberg, who recently took wins at Viagame HouseCup and The Pinnacle 2 qualifiers.
Two of the invites who managed to sneak through were the Nihilum duo of Adrian “Lifecoach” Koy and Dima “Rdu” Radu. For Lifecoach, this is another win in added to his 2015 hot streak and currently he’s at 72,2% win-rate since the start of the year with only six losses in his last 20 games. Apart from the Nihilum boys, Archon captain Jason “Amaz” Chan will also fly to Katowice after a 3-1 against Polish winner Ikealyou.
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