This year's WCG Preliminaries

The preliminaries for World Cyber Games are being held all over the world, and we have gotten to see some news about it here on GosuGamers. As not all of them have been very visible for the public it is not always very easy to find. Anyway, here is a wrap-up with some of the ones we have missed.

Spain, will they make it? We all know about the WCG Spain incident, and that the sponsors have decided to pull back from all games except two. The players and believers in the Spanish StarCraft representative in Seattle are still trying to find other local sponsors to make that happen. Although they are trying, it does not seem to help very much, and right now it does not look very bright for Spain when it comes to StarCraft WCG. Read more: » GosuGamers - forum thread » GosuGamers - news post	Hungary also having problems Apparently Spain is not the only nation this year having problems with the sponsors. However, they have decided to still play their qualifications, the winner will get nice prices and it is a very nice event to follow. As it is now, four players have qualified for the final offline tournament. Kashu[F2F] will take on Ace[F2F] and iNFERNO[F2F] will play versus Naib[F2F] in September 2nd. Read more: » TeamLiquid - forum thread
F91, Phoenix66 and Pj the Chinese triangle 19 of the absolute best players of China gathered up in the People University in Beijing at the end of July ths summer. The final qualification tournament of China took place over two days, but even during the first one we got to see a lot of upsets. Pj, Lx, F91, 66, zdy, XiaOzI, LeiLei and woailaop were the final eight - Pj managing to fight his way through the losers bracket and finish of Lx, who ended up fourth and only just missed out on a ticket to Seattle. F91, 66 together with Pj took the three spots right in front of him. Better luck next time Lx! Read more: » GosuGamers - news post » TeamLiquid - forum thread	No surprise in WCG UK The Final Qualification tournament for UK WCG was played at the Lan party i31 and after two preliminaries, Midan, Kwark, Nemesis and Spire were the ones fighting for the one ticket to Seattle. Midian who stopped playing months ago with the farewell message in the shape of a couple of VOD's of himself is apparently back now when there is a chance to go to the WCG grand finals and it came as no big surprise that he also was the one taking home the tournament too, after winning the online preliminary. Read more: » TeamLiquid - forum thread
Two Tees and a Z for Russia With a big group stage, divided into two rounds, the Russian WCG preliminary tournament started of in August 11th. With many favourites, such as Advokate, Bruce, Pomi, Ex and Android, it was somewhat of a surprise that the one winning was Notforu from 3DClan. The winner was also interviewed by MYM.Bartleby and our very own Rus_Brain from GosuGamers translated it for you, just follow the link below to read it. So after two group stages and a single elimination tournament, the Zerg player Notforu and the two Terran players Ex and Androide are the ones we will see in Seattle! Read more: » GosuGamers - news post » GosuGamers - Interview with Notforu	White-Ra, the hope of Ukraine Ukraine have been up and coming for a while now, and we all know there are a lot of good Ukrainan players. Last year White-Ra was sent to Monza, Italy to represent his country, leaving the toughest competition Strelok at home, waiting for this year. Now, they both went at it again, and still it seems White-Ra has the upper hand as he is the one who will be going to Seattle in a couple of weeks. Fighting his way through the loser bracket winning versus the Protoss player fraer in the loser bracket final got him to the grand final where he stood against Strelok, the Terran warship and winning that match also earned him the single ticket to Seattle and the WCG Grand finals. Read more: » MeetYourMakers - news post
Hwasin with the cool hwip The one and only qualification that is followed throughout the whole world, is of course, the one for South Korea. With only one preliminary for the amateurs this year, and only two of them moving on to the offline qualification there were a lot of people signing up. The two lucky fellows were umjeja[3.33] and DeviL[fOu] and together with 18 progamers qualified for being top 24 in the KESPA rankings during July, and so they fought for the spots in the second round, together with top 3 KESPA and last year's WCG finalists. After a long second round single elimination tournament the semi final was reached and we had sAviOr, Hwasin, Stork[gm] and Free[gm] left to fight for the three WCG spots. The Zerg beast and KESPA #1 for months, sAviOr, lost to Hwasin and took on Free[gm] for the third place match and managed to take one of the three spots while Hwasin and Stork[gm] met up in a duel of which Hwasin walked out victorious. This means one of each race from Korea wil go to WCG this year, Terran Hwasin, Zerg sAviOr and Protoss Stork[gm]. Read more: » GosuGamers - news post » TeamLiquid - forum thread » MeetYourMakers - news post	Testing Testie We all know that Canada has a lot of good players in what we use to call the European scene but the player you think of when mentioning Canada must be Testie. He has won most of the things you can win in StarCraft outside Korea, but the one thing he did not win yet is the World Cyber Games. However, the competition he was talking about in the MeetYourMakers interview made some time ago, did change in the actual qualification tournament. Iefnaij who Testie stated was the only one who could stand up against him, lost early in the tournament to Bandit, the one who after a crazy loser bracket final versus Schism, lost to Testie in the Grand final, two straight games (Testie starting with 1:0). So again, for the fourth time since 2004 Testie will be representing his country in WCG Grand finals in Seattle. Read more: » GosuGamers - news post » MeetYourMakers - Testie interview » TeamLiquid - forum thread
Dreiven the Pole It seems the whole European scene was holding its breath. The last game between the hack accused MIStrZZZ and the former progamer Draco were to settle everything. Draco even having troubles versus Fosken and playing through the loser bracket itself was surprising, and when he lost another one to MIStrZZZ everything changed. Draco was out of the tournament and we now had to handle the fact that someone else would be representing Poland in Seattle. Dreiven played well, but losing in the winner bracket final to Fosken put him up against MIStrZZZ in the loser bracket final. Best out of three games, but it only took Dreiven two to climb back up to the winner bracket to face Fosken in the Grand Final. There, the other hand, they used all five games, and after a great match Fosken had to step back and Dreiven stood as the winner. Congratulations Dreiven, do well in Seattle! » TeamLiquid - forum thread » WGTour - news post » Download the replays	Mondragon breaks GoOdy! Mondragon prevailed, again. What would a World Cyber Games be without the German Zerg dominator? Known for having the best Zerg versus Protoss outside of Korea, it would be sad not to see him tamper with the rest of the WCG representatives in Seattle. Defeating everyone that stood in his way, Christoph Semke seems to be in great shape and will surely be a player that will inflict danger in many players' eyes, maybe even the Koreans. Mondragon will not travel to USA alone, though. Germany has a total of three spots in this year's WCG, and the two remaining spots were filled up by Breakdown and Goody. Breakdown was representing Germany in Singapore 2005 and even though this will be GoOdy's first World Cyber Games experience, he is for sure no freshie in the scene. » WCG-Europe - news post » Download the replays
Qualified to WCG this far White-Ra Lamer, rEADy Cool2Die Fenix Maix Midian ReasoN MoonZerg Hwasin, sAviOr, Stork F91, Phoenix66, Pj Notforu, Ex, Androide Mondragon, GoOdy, Breakdown Dreiven, Draco* Testie TBA iG.Cloud, TM-FiRe- Thuoclao SteelHeart asS ChingizKhan Kaiser LoWeLy TBA TBA TBA TBA chivu And more to come Not all of the qualifiers are done yet as there are some nations still to hold events. One of them is USA who have had a lot of offline regional preliminaries over the past few weeks. The final one will be held at Universal Studios Hollywood in Florida, between September 14th to September 16th. LzGaMer, Artosis, Nesh, Nony, Nyoken, iNcontroL, Skew, IdrA, Froz and Evade will all be there, fighting for the three spots in this year's edition of the World Cyber Games. Read more in the forum thread here at GosuGamers. More preliminaries for you With so many countries with spots for the WCG, not all of them with very big or well known communities, it has been hard finding a lot of information about all of them. But we did found a couple of links and threads where you can read a little about some of them anyway. » TeamLiquid - WCG Lithuania » GosuGamers - WCG Brazil » TeamLiquid - Czech Republic/Slovakia, Kazakhstan and Latvia » TeamLiquid - WCG Bulgaria » WGTour - WCG Mexico » WGTour - WCG Uzbekistan » WGTour - WCG Baltic » WGTour - WCG Belarus » WGTour - WCG Panama » GosuGamers - WCG Italy