Week #35 of the ESL Open Cups saw familiar faces grab victories. Stats claimed his fifth Korean Cup victory, equaling Zest and Solar's count to create a triumvirate on top of the server. HeRoMaRinE secured an unprecedented fifth consecutive European Cup win amid a thinning field of competitors, increasing his total to a stupendous seventeen. Finally, Solar returned to the American server to dine on gold for his second breakfast, having missed out on a win at home earlier in the day.
Up to Cup #35 the leading duo of the Korean ESL Open medal ranking consisted of Zest and Solar at five gold medals, with Stats following closely behind them. On Monday, the Afreeca Protoss equalized the count, securing a strong victory over Dream and then getting a walk-over against Solar, who had to play a team match instead (unfortunately for Solar, he failed to lock-up a win for KaiZi Gaming). These GTC-induced default wins are starting to become a regular feature of the Korean cups, with bracket luck sometimes providing easy access to the finals. There, Stats met his second rival in the rankings in Zest, who had already played several PvP series before clashing with the Afreeca player, and seemingly ran out of steam after winning the first map. Stats then started a streak and took three wins in a row to make it his fifth ESL Open Cup KR victory. Next week, one of the three leaders may pull ahead again, but for now a triumvirate rules Korea.
HeRoMaRinE's current ESL Open Cup EU win streak: TwoThreeFour Five. For anyone keeping the record books, this Monday's victory was Big Gabe's 17th gold medal, a number no one else comes even close to, and brought up his win streak in these tournaments to 20 series in Bo3s and ten series in Bo5s. Seemingly, his rivals are growing bored of even trying to stop this dominance: Reynor, who had promised to come and snatch victory from HeRoMaRinE once more, was nowhere to be seen. Neither were Clem or ShoWTimE. Of course, they are likely to focus on DreamHack for now, foregoing participation in the ESL Open in favor of preparation and secrecy, but that's perhaps a missed opportunity to gain a much higher honor than a mere DreamHack victory: slaying the Big Gabe. Both Indy and MaNa notably came close this week, but they lacked the ability to finish the wounded monster off. Who can rescue Princess Europa from her captor? Find out next week. Or, possibly, in another five.
Such problems are unknown to the American server, where the trophy changes hands almost weekly. This week, Solar was able to come out on top of the pack, continuing his tradition of trying to win at least one competition out of the Korean and American ESL Open Cups. Since scheduling ruined his chances at a victory in his home region, the NA edition had to pay the price. Namshar notably took down both SpeCial and Vanya, showing his teeth despite the elimination from the DH Open NA. On the other side of the bracket, Cham made Solar at least fight hard to reach the finals, but after overcoming the Mexican Zerg it was a comfortable ride to the title for our victor, who dismantled Namshar without a map loss. This is the fourth gold medal for Solar in the ESL Open Cup AM, bringing up his overall count to nine, shiny Liquipedia disks.
ESL Open Cup winners earn $200 in prize money and 10 ESL Pro Tour points. Players who finish second earn 5 ESL Pro Tour points and $100. A top 4 finish guarantees at least $50. Week #36 of ESL Open Cups is set to take place on September 14th.
Every ESL american cup is a joke. Why those guys even got such big prize pool for DH? This skill level deserves something like latin america or taiwan.
On September 08 2020 17:15 deacon.frost wrote: lol Solar, misses Stats, wins NA
Edit> also why's Neeb playing in the EU only? oO
As far as I understand, Neeb preferes to have playing hours closer to a regular 9 to 5 Job. That s why he practises mostly on EU ladder and also prefers the EU Cup over the NA one..
On September 08 2020 17:05 Elantris wrote: Every ESL american cup is a joke. Why those guys even got such big prize pool for DH? This skill level deserves something like latin america or taiwan.
The prize pool seems pretty fairly distributed for DH. Namshar and Masa earned $1250 for placing 9-10th in the NA regional, which is between $1375 of Maxpax, DnS, souL, and SortOf placing 21st-24th in the EU regional and $1000 of Arctur and AqueroN placing 25th-26th, and I would say these players' skill level are comparable. In fact, I would argue the NA players earn too few EPT points since Namshar and Masa only made 20 points while their EU prize earning counterparts earned 35-50 points.
NA cup is strange because the participation of the best players in the Region to the ESL cups is sporadic. This week, out of the players qualified for DH summer, only Namshar and Nina participated in the NA cup (Neeb play the European one, MCanning the Korean one).
On NA, both Nina and Namshar had a decent run, loosing to Solar.
I don't think the ESL American cup is a joke compared to the others. Looking at the quarter-finals of all the cups, they all seem fairly equivalent. It's just that there is less depth in NA than in Europe, so showing as many rounds for ESL EU and NA makes it feel that NA cup is weak.
If we were also showing RO32 for Korean, we would also see a lot of noname.
Btw at the end of Gabe's stream on monday he said that he might play an ESL American Server Cup after Dreamhack depending on how it goes for him and how he feels. He said there is a good chance he might play it once, would be kinda fun.