The WCS Winter Champions have been crowned!

Last weekend, the StarCraft 2 World Championship Series Winter event took place, and over an action-packed two days, both the Americas and Europe found their respective Winter Champs! In the Americas, Alex ‘Neeb’ Sunderhaft managed to snatch the title in an exciting match-up with the Queen of Blades Sasha ‘Scarlett’ Hostyn, in a 4-2 game, while in Europe, an Italian prodigy by the name of Riccardo ‘Reynor’ Romiti who defeated the fan-favourite Joona ‘Serral’ Sotala in a close 4-3 match.

Both winners are walking away with a pretty impressive 1.600 WCS Circuit Points as well as a $12.000 check. Of course, the other placements in the tournament also received pretty impressive rewards – $8.000 dollars and 1.100 Circuit Points for the 2nd placed, and $6.000 and 875 Points for the third placed. The lowest placements (25th to 32nd) received $675 and 100 Points for their efforts.

For fans that missed the big event, the full replay package for the WCS Winter competition is now available for download. This pack is available on the official StarCraft WCS Website, and it contains every single match from the Round of 32 onwards, for both the Americas and Europe. In other words, there are a total of 470 games available to watch, relive and enjoy!

As you probably know, most games except the final few tournament rounds were a best of 3 round-robin-style competition, while the final playoffs were held in a single-elimination, best of 5 style, and the finals in a best of 7 competition. In other words, the replay pack contains countless hours of fun games and competitions, whether you missed the tournaments the first time around or just want to re-watch your favourite match-ups now that the winners have been crowned.

The next event, now that the WCS Winter is done, is, of course, the WCS Spring 2019 – although details for it aren’t confirmed yet, future announcements will be coming via @esportstarcraft on Twitter. The next seasonal competition is set to be as exciting as this one was of course – once again, players are competing for cash prizes and WCS Circuit Points that will determine their overall rankings – across the whole world, the top 16 players will be invited to compete in the WCS Global Finals this year, in order to determine the single best player out there! With thousands of points up for grabs in each seasonal competition as well as through regular play and other competitions, players have to fight hard throughout the year in order to secure their standings. At the moment, players Serral, Neeb, Reynor and Scarlett hold the top spots in the rankings with up to 2500 points in total – that’s an impressive amount from our champs and runner-ups from the last competition. No doubt we will see their names pop up again in future competitions – good luck to them all!