Hello folks! I’m Andrew Quan, the new tournament director for TSL. I’m handling all of TL’s tournaments moving forward, with some of the previous staffers acting as advisors. Though this will be my first TSL to run, I’ve actually had the pleasure of working on several SC2 events before. It’s an honor and privilege today for me to announce some of the details for the seventh TeamLiquid StarLeague. As a recent addition to the Team Liquid- er, team, but an old school StarCraft fan, I’ll work hard to make TSL 7 a worthy addition to TSL. Before I really start diving into the details, I’d like to give a huge thank you to our sponsors. The Shopify TSL 7 would not be possible without Twitch, Secretlab, IMC, and of course, Shopify!

Now, on to the event. We’ve taken the feedback from TSL 6 and made some adjustments that we think make sense. For the most part, things will be staying the same. We’ve got a very similar roster of talent lined up, we’ll be playing for three full weekends of games, and Shopify is returning as our wonderful title sponsor.

There are some things that we’re changing, though, and I’ll be breaking down each of those changes below. If you want an overview of all our changes, here’s a TL;DR:
+ Show Spoiler +

The biggest feedback for us was the long hours. Our casters, players, and production team were all exhausted each day of TSL6. It’s clear to us that the schedule wasn’t feasible to maintain. This was the primary motivator for two of our changes:

• First, we’ll be dropping the total number of players from 32 to 16.
• Second, we’re making the format a full Double Elimination bracket.

• Now, all matches that are in or past the Winner’s Round 2 or Loser’s Round 3 will be Best of 7.

A result of this change in players is that we also needed to reexamine our invitations. Previously, we invited 8 players, which would now mean half of our players were invited. To try to avoid a “rich getting richer” scenario with regard to EPT points, we’re changing that, too. This time, we’ll only have a single invitation, to our most recent champion: Dark.

The other 15 players will qualify through a series of 6 Qualifiers. We’ll be hosting 2 each in Korea, Europe, and North America. We’ve decided to region lock each of these qualifiers, and will only accept players participating in that region if they’ve had residence in an applicable country for a minimum of 6 months. Here’s how it breaks down:

We will be maintaining the same format for the qualifiers: Single Elimination (plus Third Place) for Korea and Double Elimination for Europe and North America. Here are the Qualifier schedules:

Expect more information on the qualifiers in the next week, including where and how to join! We’ll also be releasing all the information and process for any community casters who are interested in covering those matches.

Last up, the change in our main event broadcast time. It’ll always be difficult for us to juggle a good time across the three big regions, but we’d like to make it a little less brutal for the Korean players this time around. For the broadcast, we’ll be streaming on June 12-13, June 19-20, and June 26-27. Each day, we’ll be starting at 9 AM Eastern/3 PM Central European/10 PM Korea.

We realize there’s going to be some overlap here with the World Team League, but we’re in contact with their admins to minimize those issues as much as possible, and to let all the overlapping players compete in both.

We’re enormously excited to begin our qualifiers in two weeks and to announce our commentator line up once that’s all signed and sealed. And once again, this is all thanks to our generous and supportive sponsors. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with Shopify for past events and in the preparation we’ve done so far for TSL 7, and they’re excited to be involved as well:

See you on stream!
- TeamLiquid