Photo: Blizzard
The North Americans won both their opening matches last night, giving is a great start to the $1 million tournament.
As the clock struck 18:00 CEST on October 26, the race for the World Championship began, with 16 players waiting for their number to be cut in half by the end of the week. A total of four opening matches were played and ended with Americas’ players scoring important victories.
The most one-sided series of the night was the very first as the triple APAC grand finalist Il-Mook “Handsomeguy” Kang was given a rough welcome in the west. The Korean walked out with a blank score against Canadian Julien “Cydonia” Perrault and is now one game away from elimination, his tournament life depending on a victory against either Thijs “ThijsNL” Molendijk or “JasonZhou” on Saturday.
In Group B, Hao “Bbgungun” Li brought the second victory for the Americas, beating Europe champion Ole “Naiman” Batyrbekov in seven games. Virtus.pro still got to be on the scoreboard by the end of the evening as Artem “DrHippi” Kravets recorded the first win for Europe, though it took him another seven games against Celestial’s Yuxiang “Breath” Chen to do so.
A five-game series ended the evening when China, too, got a win with back-to-back Gold Series and Fall Championship winner “OmegaZero” dealing South Korea their second loss of the evening. It is now up to Cheonsu “Cheonsu” Kim to save his country from total defeat in the opening days.
The World Championship continues today with four more matches, as fans line-up to watch the 2016 Worlds debut of Thijs “ThijsNL” Molendijk and Will “Amnesiac” Barton, two of the favorites to walk out with a trophy.
