For the first time, DreamHack will have a North American event. There is a lot worth fighting for here, with a $50,000 prize pool and 5,000 WCS points on the line. And while it is great that DreamHack has finally crossed the Atlantic, the timing is a bit off. A week afterward, DreamHack Tours will be held in France with triple the prize pool and first place being seeded directly into the Blizzcon Finals at the end of the year. Editor's Picks The Mid-Season Invitational Power Rankings

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This creates an interesting narrative, as DreamHack Austin has become a pre-show to the bigger event, DreamHack Tours. Players who attend get a chance at money, WCS points, and some live tournament practice before the big event. On the other hand, they lose out on good practice. Likely, their opponents at DreamHack Tours will be studying their VODs and creating strategies to topple them when they meet.

In addition to that, there are fewer tournaments overall in StarCraft II. While there is still a large amount of online play, the difference between online and LAN play has always been a big factor for the majority of players. With so much competition being online in SCII, it has become harder to rate players based on performance.

Here is a list of players who will be attending both DreamHack Austin and DreamHack Tours. They are separated into four different tiers:

Tier 1:

Choi "Polt" Seong Hun

Shin "Hydra" Dong Won

Kim "viOLet" Dong Hwan

Jens "Snute" Aasgaard

Kevin "Harstem" de Koning

Tier 2:

Chris "HuK" Loranger

Théo "PtitDrogo" Freydière

Brandon "puCK" Qual

Alex "Neeb" Sunderhaft

Unknown tier:

Zhou "iAsonu" Hang

Ethan "iaguz" Zugai

Bailey "Bails" Thomas

Szymon "Guru" Nieciąg

The wild cards:

Aleksandr "Bly" Svusuyk

Ke "Has" Yu Fen

I placed the Tier 1 players based on results and LAN performance with one notable exception. Both Polt and Harstem are the champions of the most recent events, with Polt winning the WCS Winter Championship and Harstem winning WCS Shanghai. Snute is here as well since he was the runner-up to both Polt and Harstem in those tournaments. Hydra and vioLet are locks for being skilled players who have proven their worth at LANs multiple times.

The Tier 2 players are skilled, had good performances on LAN, but have a flaw that is holding them back from being an outright favorite. HuK reached top eight at WCS Winter and he has continued to have a consistent level at LAN, but Protoss vs. Zerg has been his weakest matchup so far in Legacy of the Void. PtitDrogo won DreamHack Leipzig and got a top four at WCS Shanghai, but he has a flaw similar to HuK's, with a weak matchup in Protoss vs. Terran.

Puck was another top-four finisher at WCS Shanghai and he doesn't have a particularly weak matchup. However, he has dropped PvP sets to a lot of Protoss, including HuK, Neeb and Harstem.

The last player in this tier is Neeb, who is widely regarded as one of the best international players in the world. He also has yet to make a LAN result, both because there are fewer LANs to attend and because he ran into Hydra early on in WCS Winter. While I think he's as good as any player here, he hasn't given me any proof to believe he can perform on LAN.

The unknown tier of players are just that -- unknown. They've all played online, with the exception of iAsonu. None of them has attended a LAN this year. They've all proven to be good enough online to become representatives of their region. The skill gap between the best players in WCS and the middling players isn't that wide, so an upset has a decent chance of occurring. As for iAsonu, he plays too stylistically for me to confidently place him in any tier when it comes to Western competition.

The final players to look out for are Bly and Has. Both players are aggressive and stylistic. Both are upse-makers and have a wide variance in skill. The biggest difference between them is that Bly on his worst day is still one of the better European Zergs. Has, on his worst day, is everyone else's worst day. I know he's going to cheese. His opponents know he is going to cheese. The casters know he is going to cheese. The audience knows he is going to cheese. People who only follow the game casually know he is going to cheese.

Yet, he keeps getting away with it over and over again because of how ridiculous, weird and creative his cheese is. It doesn't matter what tournament you throw Has in; it doesn't matter how outmatched he is. He could be the worst player in the entire tournament, but he'll still find a way to upset players far better than he is. Or he could bomb out the second he meets a better opponent. You never know with Has, but damned if it isn't a show.