An ambitious new tournament series for StarCraft: Brood War has been announced.
The "Premier Star League," or PSL will begin with a 30,000,000 won tournament this August, with ambitions to expand to larger individual tournaments and a Proleague-style tournament in 2025.
The PSL introduced itself at a press conference held at the Esports Hall of Fame on Wednesday. The PSL is backed by PNB, a telecommunications equipment company. Ex-KTF head coach Jung Soo Young, a long-time acquaintance of PNB's chairman (and presumed owner), will be the overall director. Former STX coach Kim Min Gi will also be involved in operations. Kim Chul Min and Nal_Ra have initially been announced as the Korean casters.
The PSL will begin with the "PSL Challenge League" on August 3rd (qualifiers on July 27th), with games played offline from the RedForce PC Arena in Sadang-dong (a PC Bang with an esports tournament stage). The tournament will be divided into three rounds and conclude with a season finals. Each round will be played as an 8-player single-elimination tournament, with 5,000,000 won in prize money awarded per round. The total prize money for the event is 30,000,000 won (ambiguous wording in the articles, but the assumption is that the season finals would award 15,000,000 won).
The tournament will have a weekly broadcast every Saturday, with the games to be streamed via PNB's AfreecaTV channel. One media outlet, Sports Kyunghyang, reported that PSL plans to stream on Chzzk and YouTube as well.
While the reporting from the press conference is somewhat unclear, it appears that PSL plans to hold three total PSL Challenge League tournaments in 2024 ( unclear if this means starting this year, or if this is the plan starting in 2025). The top 6 players from the three Challenge League tournaments will join 10 players from preliminaries in a final "Korea Championship" with 100,000,000 won in total prize money.
Going forward, PSL's goal is to hold a "Starleague" tournament by Q1 2025, and a Proleague-style tournament with 6+ teams by Q2 2025.
If they actually revive Proleague for BroodWar (and not just in name only) I will totally take credit for that, considering I literally just said a week or two ago that Proleague not being revived is a clear indication of BWs failing popularity in Korea over time. I anti-jinxed it!
On a more serious note: That sounds amazing, even as a non-BroodWar fan. Though it also feels a bit sketchy? How can there be a "presumed owner" for something that must be quite the name in Korea? ._.
Edit: Now that I think about it...could this be connected to Flashs rumored return?
On July 11 2024 13:01 Balnazza wrote: If they actually revive Proleague for BroodWar (and not just in name only) I will totally take credit for that, considering I literally just said a week or two ago that Proleague not being revived is a clear indication of BWs failing popularity in Korea over time. I anti-jinxed it!
On a more serious note: That sounds amazing, even as a non-BroodWar fan. Though it also feels a bit sketchy? How can there be a "presumed owner" for something that must be quite the name in Korea? ._.
Edit: Now that I think about it...could this be connected to Flashs rumored return?
Business titles are weird in east Asia and not 1-to-1 with western equivalents; it's 99.999% that this guy is the owner/CEO but I wrote "presumed" cause it's not 100%. No need to read too deeply into it.
Hope they can find interested orgs for the Proleague style tournament. If it’s just groups of players on silly named teams it would still be fun, but probably won’t have the same lasting impact.
If Sea, Guemchi, Bisu and allegedly Flash can return, maybe Kim "procurer" Carrier can make his return as well. But if KCM is involved, I doubt those last 2 can actually return lol
Looking forward to it, and I hope this time there's not going to be any beef and scheduling conflicts between PSL and ASL.
Hopefully we get a round-robin group stage and Bo5's back???
On July 11 2024 13:01 Balnazza wrote: If they actually revive Proleague for BroodWar (and not just in name only) I will totally take credit for that, considering I literally just said a week or two ago that Proleague not being revived is a clear indication of BWs failing popularity in Korea over time. I anti-jinxed it!
On a more serious note: That sounds amazing, even as a non-BroodWar fan. Though it also feels a bit sketchy? How can there be a "presumed owner" for something that must be quite the name in Korea? ._.
Edit: Now that I think about it...could this be connected to Flashs rumored return?
Sorry but I have to chime in here, I was actually projinxing it a couple of weeks back too:
On June 27 2024 07:20 PVJ wrote: First of all thanks for continuously keeping us posted! Especially these old-team showmatches, it was tense and wild and made root and shout in all sorts of positions of the set that I was surprised by myself. I hope that one day afreeca tries a round robin proleague with weekly matches, with 4 fully stacked teams that would be 6 or 12 weeks with 1 or 2 matches or rounds, then 4 weeks of play-offs would give a quarter-year competition that I believe watching these pl every now and then, and the Kcm league constantly, is still the pinnacle of scbw.
I also want to add after watching two Samsung matches and the two proleagues before, + Show Spoiler +
Stork is playing some amazing games! Even if some are against less accomplished players or on maps where strategic thinking is more important than its execution like Monty hall, I can't deny I think I haven't seen such good calls and battles from him since the Ksl Ro4 run. It makes me radiate my inner child.
EPT
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