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StarLadder, one of the biggest esports operators in Europe, announces two StarCraft II leagues, designed for Russian-language community and sponsored by Blizzard - Amateur and Ultimate Series.
![[image loading]](https://s.starladder.com/uploads/ckeditor/elfinder/StarCraft/Amateur/AMATEUR_Series_2.jpg)
Amateur Series is a competition for all casual and up&coming players, which provides anyone with an opportunity to experience competitive StarCraft. Players of all levels are accepted, even the ones without purchased StarCraft II copy - Starter Edition is enough to take part. Basically, the only requirement for players to take part is being able to speak Russian to be able to communicate with other tournament participants and referees.
Tournament platform, designed for Amateur Series, contains such features as seeding by MMR (allows to make proper seedings automatically) and map vetoing (gives players an opportunity to make vetos indepentdently and get a mappool for the series beforehand). Basic format is 4 players GSL-style groups till there are 8 players left and single elimination afterwards.
Amateur Series features $500 prize pool and slots in Ultimate Series for TOP 4 finishers. The tournament starts on August 12th and is planned to finish in the middle of September.
![[image loading]](https://s.starladder.com/uploads/ckeditor/elfinder/StarCraft/Amateur/Ultimate_Series_2.jpg)
Ultimate Series features high-level competition between 16 strongest players from CIS. 8 of them will be invited based on their ladder rankings, 4 will advance from Open Qualifiers and 4 slots are left for Amateur Series winners. Ultimate Series is the first major StarCraft II ocmpetition to feature popular esports Swiss-like Triple Elimination system for 16 competitors (see CS:GO majors as an example of system implementation).
Ultimate Series will happen in September - October. If you're part of the Russian language community, you're able to find more information about both Amateur and Ultimate series at http://sc2.starladder.com
If you want to bring the best action of Amateur or Ultimate series to your language as a community caster, please contact me via PM or starcraft@starladder.tv.
Hopefully our event will run smoothly and open more opportunities for regional StarCraft II competitions next year!
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Pretty cool idea, but I'm curious about the demographic choice? Are there actually that many top Russian players? Surely something like this would do even better in NA or EU. Like an SSL Premier and Challenger for the EU/NA scene. I could see that doing very well.
Regardless, good luck with this and I hope it works out!
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Hello everyone! As our Amateur Series season is coming to its final weekend, I'd like to share some interesting and inspiring numbers about our tournament and CIS community in general.
We had 947 StarCraft II players registered in our competition. There were players from Tier 3 Bronze as well as several grandmaster players with up to 6000 MMR (which was the limit for amateurs), some of the participants are just Starter Edition users. Most of these players (around 650) actually checked-in and competed in CIS Amateur Series, making it one of the biggest competitions in the history of StarCraft II. We've already completed Round of 1024, Ro512, Ro256, Ro128, Ro64 and Ro32 (all rounds were played in GSL-style groups) and now we're ready to proceed to Ro16 (final GSL-style groups round) and Single Elimination playoffs.
Let's see how the racial distribution changed through the tournament run:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/v0pjc8b.png)
We've started from 329 terrans, 251 zergs, 277 protosses and 90 randoms - and currently there are 6 terrans, 5 zergs and 5 protoss players left. The last random player remaining was Judgin (~4800 MMR) who was knocked out in the Round of 32.
As we've also implemented automatic map pool selection for Amateur Series matches, players were able to make their map vetos before each round, choosing up to two maps which they don't want to play on. Let's see which maps are the least popular in our community:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/xsId8L1.png)
It's no wonder that Catallena is the least favored map for both casual and high-level amateur players. However, it seems like high-level players like Interloper and Mech Depot much more than casuals, who prefer Abyssal Reef and Odyssey more. And it's quite interesting that Ascension to Aiur is our absolute #1 map as the one which was vetoed the least. Both casual and high-level amateur players like it more than any other map in the current pool.
What about balance and winrates in certain matchups? I'd probably like to show your more graphics, but it's absolutely pointless as winrates in all 3 non-mirror matchups are almost equal to 50%! We have 49% in PvT, 53% in ZvP and 52% in TvZ. TvT is also the most popular mirror matchup comsidering the number of terrans playing (we had 141 TvTs, 79 ZvZs and 80 PvPs so far).
Brackets of all Amateur Series rounds are available on our website (unfortunately, only with Russian interface).
If you're interested in high-level amateur competitors, join our broadcast at StarLadder this Saturday and Sunday at 11:00 CEST!
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Russian Federation30 Posts
No one knows how to use Catallena in the current meta
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Thanks for the information. Could you provide winrates per matchup for each map?
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Amateur Series is over with   Mozgus_Chan aka DmC taking the trophey, but we're already proceeding to $2,500 Ultimate Series with best Russian and Ukrainian players competing!
Saturday, 17:00 CEST:
  Bly vs DmC
 Creed vs HellraiseR
Couguar vs ExE
DIMAGA vs Lucifer
Sunday, 17:00 CEST:
Rail vs BETON
BratOK vs Awers
Arctur vs Minato
Kas vs BuRning
Live stream (Russian).
Event website (Russian)
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Have you consider the same format but with best-of-4? So "draw" is possible, since 16 players competing with each other every idividual game should mean more in terms of mapscore/result
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Actually, no, as we're strictly following Swiss Triple Elimination format which is easy to predict in terms of schedule. We'll consider your idea, thank you!
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Alex007, information about this event is added to the liquipedia?
Is there a link to the circuit?
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Russian Federation249 Posts
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EPT
