With the top eight players from Korea clashing with the top eight Circuit players in the group stage, we saw some remarkable games of StarCraft II as the World Championship Series (WCS) Global Finals started with a bang today. The biggest story on the first day was our first matchup between Juan Carlos ‘SpeCial” Tena Lopez and Kim ‘Stats’ Dae Yeob.

SpeCial is an exceptionally powerful player who started the year with an explosive performance at Dreamhack Austin, but, as the year unfolded, he couldn’t maintain his form to build an intimidating resume heading into the Global Finals. Meanwhile, Stats brought his signature style of steady domination to the Global StarCraft II League (GSL) in Korea. By the time the Global Finals came around, Stats was the top seed in the WCS Korean standings while SpeCial was the bottom seed for WCS Circuit players. It looked like it would be an open-and-shut case, that these two would meet in the first match of the day, but SpeCial had other plans.

In Game 1 of their series, SpeCial beat Stats at his own game. For every bit of streamlined macro resource management or razer-sharp micro control Stats brought to the table, SpeCial did it better. In every clash, every engagement, SpeCial took a bite out of the Protoss forces until Stats couldn’t keep up any more. While Stats managed to take the second game of the match with some relentless harassment from packs of nimble, but hard-hitting, Adepts, SpeCial closed out the series with an unbreakable offensive siege to close out the biggest statistical upset possible.

The rest of the day gave us more amazing matches, but if you only watch one game from this first day of Opening Week, make it Game 3 of Alex ‘Neeb’ Sunderhaft versus Lee ‘Rogue’ Byung Ryul (@4:50:00). This tense game was nearly an hour of each player poking and retreating, with the outcome of the match resting on who engaged the final fight in the better position.

The second day of the HGC Finals at Opening Week kicked off with Fnatic dispatching Dark Sided, the representatives from Australia & New Zealand. Fnatic went on to face Team Freedom from North America, who earned their match against the all-Swedish powerhouse by winning out over China’s Beyond the Game. Team Freedom were able to steal a Battleground off of Fnatic but ultimately fell in three games.

Team Freedom would claw their way back, however, by knocking off Beyond the Game for a second time in the decider match of Group B. It was one of the most entertaining matches of the day with the two teams notching 43 total kills across the two games. Game 2, which sent Team Freedom on to Anaheim, accounted for 31 total kills alone.

With that result, Fnatic and Team Freedom move on to the knockout stage of the tournament with Beyond the Game and Dark Sided exiting the HGC Finals.

Day 3’s matches are some of the most anticipated clashes of the year, with Team Dignitas taking on Korea’s Tempest and Roll20 Esports duking it out with the RED Canids. Two HGC North America teams are through to BlizzCon. Can Roll20 make it 3-for-3 for the region?

Opening Week resumes with more incredible games beginning with the WCS Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m. PDT and the HGC starting up at 11:00 a.m. PDT on BlizzCon.com.