2024 Off-season Community Weekly Cups
Week of November 4-10
by Wax
Community organizers have flooded in to fill the gap left by the ESL Open Cups, with WardiTV Mondays, the KSR Cup (Kaelaris-Steadfast-RotterdaM), the PiGosaur Cup, and the revived Olimoleague creating a grassroots version of the ESL cup ecosystem (of course, the bi-weekly KSL never stopped).
With prize pools and the level of competition being on par with the ESL Opens, it's time to bring back our weekly recaps and help fans check up on the form of their favorite SC2 pros.
WardiTV Mondays #9 (partial bracket shown)
WardiTV Mondays are currently the only cup being played on the live version of SC2 (5.0.13) instead of the PTR, but this doesn't seem to be affecting the results. After all, good players generally remain good regardless of the patch, and we saw that in Wardi Monday #9 as Clem faced MaxPax for the 23945890th time in a cup finals. Clem was victorious over his rival this time around, taking a 3-2 win.
*****
Kaelaris-Steadfast-Rotti Cup #10 (partial bracket shown)
It seems like the community weeklies truly inherited the spirit of the ESL Opens, because hours later, Clem and MaxPax clashed once more in the finals of KSR #10 (fittingly, played in the timeslot of the old EPT Europe Weekly). Clem prevailed once more by a 3-2 scoreline, achieving a weekly 'double' of sorts.
*****
PiGosaur Cup #5 (partial bracket shown)
It would have been quite entertaining if Clem and MaxPax had gone for a third clash in the PiGosaur Cup (which roughly takes the timeslot of the old EPT Americas Cup), but both of them decided to sit it out and let some other players get a taste of the prize money. This resulted in a Korean ZvZ finals of SHIN vs Solar, with SHIN continuing to show off his fantastic off-season form by winning 3-2.
*****
OlimoLeague Week #229
Moving on to Tuesday, Olimoleague returned to the scene for the first time since 2022 with a new series of weekly tournaments. With Korean streaming platform Chzzk as the sponsor, Olimoleague will be holding weekly tournaments which feed into more lucrative monthly and season final events (the winter finals will feature a 5,000,000 KRW prize pool).
The weeklies resumed with edition #229. As one might expect from a tournament that's picking up for the EPT Korea Cup, herO defeated all comers to win the first Olimoleague event in over two years.