18 May 2017, 12:01

The stream schedule can be found here

Written by @The matches are scheduled and the round of 8 is right around the corner. This weekend, the ESOC Spring championship for 2017 moves one step closer to crowning a champion. Will it be the defending champion, LordRaphael? Can BlackStar_OP regain the glory and take the crown back? Or will one of the other six contenders step up and establish themselves as the new power player on the scene. Tune in this weekend to find out!In the opening match of the round of 8, birthday boy Mitoe takes on snowww. Mitoe has always seemed like he is on the verge of making a deep run in the ESOC seasonal championship but has thrown away series leads in the last two events. Can he seal the deal against snowww? Snowww seems to be gaining steam as the tournament progresses. He needed a reverse sweep to survive Optimus_Prime but then dismantled last season’s 3rd place finisher mongo10 in a convincing 3-0.The defending champion overcame a serious threat from betting master GoodSpeed in the round of 16 but managed to hold on by taking the final game in an Aztec mirror, will the same be true in the round of 8? His challenger, Stanley_Winston has had an interesting run so far. After originally wanting to drop out of the tournament before the bracket stage started, he took down his first two opponents without losing a game. In the round of 16, it again took him to the final game in the series before taking the win over KINGofOsmane with solid Aztec play.In the opening match on Sunday, we will see BlackStar_OP continue his quest to regain the title. His play so far has lived up to the hype as he is the only one of two players in the round of 8 who has yet to drop a game. His opponent, Tit, has also shown some very strong play and has been the surprise of the tournament so far. While dealing with chants of “well lagged” in the Twitch chat, he has rolled through the first trashcan, magimagi and SomppuKunkku. On paper, this looks like one of the best matchups of this round but in reality we might expect to see BlackStar continue his roll to the finals.In the final match of the weekend, we see famous caster QueenofDestiny’s boy toy KaiserKlein take on Knusch. Both of these players are relative new comers to this level of the tournament, but neither can be taken lightly. With BlackStar, Knusch is the other player to make it to this point without dropping a game. Kaiser has been strong, but has shown that he can be beaten while losing games to both Tedere12 and IAmSoldieR. Can Knusch continue his roll or will show the French communities power and move on.As always, match sure to tune in at Twitch.tv/ESOCTV!