The World Electronic Sports Games (WESG) Global Finals kick off today at Chongqing Olympic Sports Center in Chongqing, China. Most of the action in the first few days is focused on the Heartstone and Dota 2 tournaments, but most of the buzz in the media is coming from the world of CS:GO.
The IEM Katowice grand finalist ENCE is the most recent cancellation in a series of cancelations citing scheduling conflict and visa issues. This comes as a follow-up to the representatives of Kazakhstan k23 and Argentina’s Isurus also citing similar problems and canceling their attendance.
Additionally the South Korean MVP PK withdrew from the tournament without an official statement from the organization. All of the cancelations to date are throwing a serious curve ball in the tournament system especially in Group C where both k23 and Isurus were slotted making the group a two-team brawl for seeding between MIBR and AGO.
The action is set to kick off on the 11th of March and we hope we won’t lose any more rosters from the competition.
The remaining 28 are still fighting for $890,000 in prize money with the winner taking half a million back home. The tournament features 8 groups in a round-robin system after which the 2 best performing teams move on to the Round of 16 phase. As previously mentioned MIBR and AGO already secured their spot with their competition eliminating themselves instead, and now are going directly into the Bo16 round.
Due to the specific ruleset of having national representatives from different regions, and only allowing teams to be consisted of players from the same nationality, the teams are mashups of professional athletes from different organizations pitted together to represent their respective countries. The national representatives system saw some success back in the early 2000s with tournaments like the ESWC and WCG, and was later seen as inadequate for the global esport landscape, yet WESG and IESF still adhere to the system and complicate the global schedule year on year.
© WESG
The system is definitely beneficial for the squads of Fnatic, NiP, G2, Optic Gaming, mibr and the Chinese squads but not so much for everyone else.
These five teams are also the teams to look at when it comes to the final prize distribution with mibr leading the pack after an amazing performance at IEM Katowice. From the group division the toughest battle will be in Group A where both NiP and G2 are battling USA’s Singularity and the Vietnamese squad of Revolution for the two spots advancing in the tournament. The full group schedule is available at WESGs official site: WESG.com/Schedule Male Final
We are not done yet…
The CS:GO female tournament will take place 13-17th of March with an even lower prize fund then previous years at $105,000. ($170,000 previously). It features 8 teams in total split into two groups, with top two performers from each group advancing into a semifinal.
The tournament features some heavy competition with the squad of USA’s CLG.Red split between them and Canada’s TDC. Additionally, paiN Gaming acquired the roster of TiMe DaS LiNdAs the South American representatives and provided some practice for the all-girl Brazilian squad and Europe having Team France who won the final against the girl from Sweden to secure the spot at WESG.
The full schedule is available at: WESG.com/Schedule Female Final
Finally, the pick’em for the final winner in both divisions is as follows:
For all the CS:GO action tune in at Twitch.tv/WESG_CSGO starting March 7, 2019 at 5:00am CET.
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