It’s being a month since OSC Esports started the weekly tournament focused on the Latin American region called “Sentimiento Latino”. Besides OSC points, this series of tournaments also had a prize pool for the two finalists, something not common in our region. With the added rule that players who had placed in the top 16 of WCS can’t participate, several players that felt unmotivated to compete started to sign up every friday for a chance to claim the prize. In addition, this “special” rule is probably the best thing and organizer could have done for a region like ours that needed some kind of competition apart from Copa America. It is known to everyone that Latin America have two players that excel the rest and a third one that comes close. SpeCial, Kelazhur and Cham usually takes all the glory, fame and money from every LatAm competition and good for them, they deserved it, and that is the reason that a weekly like this was needed. An arena that let the up and coming players fight and compete to gain experience, money and recognition that would serve later as a stepping-stone in to greater things, that is what Sentimiento Latino is for our community.

Participation
SL 1 and 2 were the more populated having more than 30 players signed up and the last two editions dropped to 16 players. It was expected to have a high amount the players in the first’s editions but sadly, the amount of players that stopped playing was greater than I expected. It’s underwhelming to see how a tournament aimed to help the scene don’t receive the support that it should, even more coming from a region that needs all the help it can get.

The environment of LatAm
Although 90% of the time our representatives for WCS are terrans, the region have a massive zerg player base. It is normal to have Copa America qualifiers with 10 zergs in the top 16. Sentimiento Latino followed this unwritten rule and had a similar percentage of the swarm in every round of 16. Also, with the absence of SpeCial and Kelazhur, another terran took the baton and became the new hero of Latin American terrans, the Chilean Jarppi (aka Jens). Lastly, the noble race of Aiur saw a little increase of representatives in the top 16 with an average of 3 players in the ro16 still their best results just got them to the ro8. The protoss are starting to show up when before they didn’t even appeared on the map.

The best player
The rising star of these tournaments is definitely the Chilean player Jarppi. He won the first edition and was a runner up two times, his worst result was a top 8. His best matchup is definitely TvZ were he prefer going mech. Players like JimRising and Halfbreed were destroyed this way. He was close to breakthrough a couple of time the last year at Copa America but didn’t manage to succeed at the end. There is room for improvement and we still need to see how strong his TvP is but its possible that he will become a force to be acknowledge in the near future.

Bonus: Chile, as a nation, looks the strongest right now. Apart from Jarppi, the “comeback” of HalfBreed and the consistency of Dastan and Lseba puts their country on top of the regional ladder. Could NW5 dream be possible?

The up and coming players
EON, the player from Costa Rica/USA, has played 3 weeklys placing in the top 4 two times. This is a rather successful event because normally the participation of Central America players is almost nonexistent. Furthermore, EON never make it pass the Copa qualifiers and having him taking series from players like TheZergLord it’s a good indicative that we could see him getting farther in the next weeklys or even in a top 16 at Copa America.

The Argentinian player EGG has being participating in several events lately starting with the regional WESG tournaments. In Sentimiento Latino he got two top 8 and one top 4. His ZvZ has being his bane recently; losing to JimRising and Erik in the weeklys he played. Little by little EGG is starting to climb the Latin American ladder, challenging the more known players of the region. We don’t know if he will continue practicing but for now its nice to see the argentinian flag up there.

Conclussion
If separating the scene in WCS Circuit and WCS Korea helped the foreign scene grow stronger, the same can be told here. The absence of the top of the top players is letting the lesser-known players grow little by little. Maybe we won’t see the results in the short term but it surely is a giant step in the right direction. Thank you very much to OSC Esports, JimRising and DARKING who made this possible.