The $40,000 DreamHack Summer will offer what every pro player wants - swiss rounds

Photo: Abraham Engelmark / DreamHack

DreamHack returns to Jonkoping, Sweden and it’s bigger than ever before. $40,000, 128 players and grueling swiss rounds – that’s the scope of DreamHack Summer, June 13-15.

“We want to discover Hearthstone’s next start,” write DreamHack in their official press release and from the looks of it, they’re determined to see this through. Their summer event with its $40,000 prize pool is not only the biggest tournament in the west for this year, but also the first major offline battlefield to feature a swiss stage as part of its schedule.

The 128 players will have to go through seven rounds of non-elimination swiss. This means that each contender will play exactly seven matches against opponents with similar scores, so that the best performing ones can rise to the top. The swiss standings will be cut at the top eight, and the remaining players will then enter a single elimination bracket to determine the champion.

According to DreamHack project manager Michael "Adebisi" van Driel, the organizers are doing their best to not show favoritism towards certain players and their goal is a fair first come, first served player selection.

Our ambition is to have no preferential treatment for competitors and treat them all as equal, so we will work on first come, first served basis. At the same time, however, international travel is very expensive and teams need to be able to plan, so we will work with some teams to reserve slots for their players who will be travelling so they can know they have slots for sure. In the future our goals are definitely to be able to run tournaments where there is enough slots that this isn't a concern, but for now we want to start with something we are confident we can manage, and 128 players live on-site is already a lot to begin with.”
 

DreamHack Summer will be the eighth Hearthstone event held on DH soil. In 2014, almost $50,000 were awarded to Hearthstone players but the circuit is already bigger this year. The $10,000 PGL Tavern Tales tournament is about to happen in Bucharest between April 24-26, followed by the smaller $3,000 DreamHack Tours in France. Counting the Summer event in question, that’s $53,000 between the first three DreamHack events this year, and there’s more announcements to be made about the Hearthstone Grand Prix soon.

Sign-ups for the tournament open on May 1^st on DreamHack.se.