2018 StarCraft II World Championship Series

The 2018 StarCraft II World Championship Series (WCS) is the 2018 edition of the

The 2018 StarCraft II World Championship Series was separated into two regions, WCS Circuit and WCS Korea. The former featured four large events with accompanying qualifiers under the WCS Challenger branding, while the latter featured three seasons of the long-running Global StarCraft II League (GSL) Code S with two smaller GSL Super Tournament events interspersed. Two shared World Championship Series Global events featured players from both regions prior to the Global Finals. All these events gave out WCS Circuit and/or WCS Korea points that determined the seeding of the Global Finals.^[1]

Following the introduction of the War Chest for the 2017 Global Finals, two events received War Chest crowdfunding in 2018, with $150,000 and $200,000 added to the prize pools of IEM Katowice and the WCS Global Finals, respectively.^[5][6]

Seeding

Eight players from each WCS region qualify to the event based on their WCS Points-based rankings. Winners of WCS Circuit stops, GSL Code S events, and IEM Katowice receive automatic qualification. The sixteen players are then seeded into four four-player groups for the first round based on their region-specific ranking. A draw is held for the quarterfinals bracket, with winners of each group facing second-place finishers of other groups.^[7]

Results

For the first time in StarCraft II competition, both regions had all of their large events won by a single person. For WCS Circuit this was

They featured a group stage as the first round of play, played out the prior week as part of the BlizzCon Opening Week 2018, followed by bracket play from the quarterfinals onward at the convention center itself.

	Quarterfinals				Semifinals				Finals
	Maru	0
	sOs	3			sOs	0
	SpeCial	1			Stats	3
	Stats	3							Stats	2
	Rogue	3							Serral	4
	TY	2			Rogue	1
	Dark	0			Serral	3
	Serral	3

References