How about an offline event in China with an amazing prize pool of 36,000$ for each game? The PC company Lenovo is hosting an event called The IEST with announced foreign players Draco and Legionnare. Read on.
Lenovo is a company connected with the Personal Computing Division of IBM. They produce and markets PC products from around the world. Their head office is in USA, however their main activity is in China. Their success in China can be proved by being one of the olympic partners for the Olympic Games in 2004 in Turin and the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing. Now, to grow even bigger and set a name for themselves, they host an offline event in their main nation - China. They call the event the International Electronic Sports Tournament 2006, IEST in short.
What's particularily interesting is the total prize sum of the tournaments - $36,000 USD for each tournament - WarCraft and StarCraft alike. This amount of money is almost equally large as the World Cyber Games prize money in 2005! With the 4th-8th special prize WCG offered $40,000 USD to each game.
| IEST StarCraft maps Luna the Final R-Point 1.0 Ride of Valkyries Rush Hour 2.0 IEST WarCraft III maps Twisted Meadows Turtle Rock Echo Isles Terenas Stand |
mYm.Draco and 
Legionnaire have been invited already, according to MeetYourMakers and TeamLiquid. Three more foreign players will be invited, while the other spots will be filled by Chinese players qualifying. For the WarCraft tournament the very popular player 
MYM]Moon has been invited, says the MeetYourMakers management. And considering the popularity of 
4K^Grubby and 
4K^ToD (shown in the StarsWar III event) should be invited as well, however no announcement of that yet. Legionnaire, once again playing in a major offline event - this time IEST |
At TeamLiquid.net, one of the participants for the StarCraft tournament - Legionnaire, tells that he has not played since World Cyber Games, but that they wanted him despite that.
- Considered that I had done my necessary duty, and I wasn't about to keep trying to talk them out of it, Legionnaire says and smiles. He hopes to see Pj and Lx in the tournament. It is also said by
Wufan at TeamLiquid that 
Mondragon has been invited. Another player that should be in the spotlight for this tournament should be Testie. GosuoGamers asked him and he replied and said he had not received any invitation (- yet?).Keep your eyes open the upcoming weeks for the other players to be announced!
Links
TheIEST.com - International Electronic Sports Tournament
Lenovo.com - Official site
MeetYourMakers.com - Source