Both the Gold Series and OGN Masters finals came to a close this weekend, and the champions might surprise you.
It’s been a long road for the South Korean players at OGN Masters and even longer ones for the Chinese competing in the Gold Series circuit. While it took slightly over than a month for Korea’s premier tournament to complete, the time between the first Gold Series open amounted to ten months. Both tournaments are now over, though, and China and Korea know which names they should be closely following this coming year.
Over in Korea, Seogui defeated local veteran Time 4-1 to win $17,000 and 15 HWC points. As a lot of Korea’s finest players couldn’t make it to the Ro16, Seogui faced very few familiar faces, his most notable opponents being Woong-Sub “Palmblad” Kwak and Gang-Hyeon “Steelo” Cho, both members of All-Killers, Korea’s premier Hearthstone clan.
In China, it came down to a five-game series between Team Celestial hope and 2015 HWC finalist Hong “Zoro” Yijie and Zhang “ZhangBo” Bo from Yolo Miracle. In the eyes of the experts, Zoro came into the finals as the definite favorite, representing China on the world Hearthstone stage and having defeated HWC China champion Guo “LoveCX” Zhongkai earlier in the bracket. Indeed, Zoro gave ZhangBo a good fight but his Paladin succumbed to ZhangBo’s Shaman aggression in game five, and so $23,300 went to the YM star.
VODs from the Gold Series finals can be found in our VOD archives here, while the rebroadcast of the OGN Grand Finals is right here.
