WCS Winter Round of 8 Viewer's Guide
Now that the excitement of IEM Katowice and WESG are behind us, it’s time to dive into the StarCraft II World Championship Series (WCS) Winter Round of 8.
The Top 8
| Europe | America |
| Julian “Lambo” Brosig | Pablo “Cham” Blanco |
| Mikolaj “Elazer” Ogonowski | Alex “Neeb” Sunderhaft |
| Riccardo “Reynor” Romiti | Sasha “Scarlett” Hostyn |
| Gabriel “HeRoMaRinE” Segat | Max “Astrea” Angel |
| Artem “Rail” Avramenko | Li “TIME” Peinan |
| Théo “PtitDrogo” Freydière | Sean “Probe” Kempen |
| Tobias “ShoWTimE” Sieber | Maru “MaSa” Kim |
| Joona “Serral” Sotala | Brandon “puCK” Qual |
The Format
We’ve listened to your feedback and changed things up for this Top 8. Everyone will play everyone in their region in a best-of-three, in true round-robin style. When it’s all over, the top six from each region will enter their region’s gauntlet playoff bracket, seeded based on their placement in the Round of 8. This means that the top-finishing player in both Europe and the Americas are guaranteed second place at least in the tournament. To keep track of the Round of 8 results and how they will seed into the playoff brackets, check out the 2019 WCS Winter Liquipedia pages for the Americas and Europe.
The playoffs will be taking place live and in person on April 6 and 7 at the Blizzard Arena Los Angeles studio – broadcast times and stream locations to come!
Schedule
Saturday, March 23: 7 a.m. PDT/3 p.m. CET
- 4 rounds of Europe
- 3 rounds of the Americas
Sunday, March 24: 7 a.m. PDT/3 p.m. CET
- 3 rounds of Europe
- 4 rounds of the Americas
Streams
The WCS Winter Round of 8 will be broadcast live on the StarCraft Twitch channel with Ravi “feardragon” Pareek, Nathan “Nathanias” Fabrikant, and Geoff “iNcontrol” Robinson. We will be running four games at once during the Round of 8, so we have brought in some backup for the English coverage to ensure you won’t miss your favorite match-ups.
Additional English Coverage:
- Wardiii
- ZombieGrub
- BasetradeTV
We also will bring you coverage of the WCS Winter Top 8 in seven additional languages thanks to our community partners:
- German: TakeTV
- Polish: emStudio, ESL_Poland, IndyStarCraft
- French: O’Gaming
- Russian: StarLadder, Psinsin
- Spanish: HorussTV
- Portuguese: DeathzoneTV
- Traditional Chinese: ALGS (Americas only)
Remember to follow @StarCraft and @esportstarcraft for all things about the best game of all time. We’ll see you in Twitch chat for the WCS Winter Round of 8!