Written by: ReiNNNN
GosuGamers will be heading to China for the G-1 League offline finals, courtesy of our sponsor GIGABYTE.The G-1 Finals bring you the first global offline tournament of the year, with six of the best teams worldwide. Invictus Gaming, LGD, DK, Orange, Alliance and Liquid will be fighting for the crown at the G-1 League finals in the Riverside Sports Centre from Friday to Sunday.
Table of Contents
1. The teams
2. Location
3. Schedule
4. Format
5. All-stars game
6. Casters
7. GosuGamers to China and beyond!
8. GIGABYTE Gosubet contest
9. Vote, vote, vote!
The teams
The six teams above will be battling in season five of the G-1 Champions League. All the teams have gone through gruelling qualifier sessions and knocked out many top teams in order to secure one of the six spots - four for the Asian qualifiers and two for the Western,- available this season.
No big surprise from the Asian side, as the top four placers of the last season will be making their return to the G-1 League. Now, it is up to Alliance and Team Liquid to silence critics and take down the best of the best from Asia.
Location
JiangWan Sports Centre also known as Riverside Sports Centre will be the host to the G-1 Champions League 2013 offline finals. An old school stadium built in the middle of downtown Shanghai, JiangWan Sports Centre was opened in 1934 and has since, hosted the National Games of China event on three separate occassions.
Players and members of the media, aka us, will be staying at Lan Tian Hotel (Blue Sky Hotel), just some 500 metres south of the sports centre.
Schedule
The G-1 League offline finals will be beginning this Friday at 05:00 CEST (yay Europe). All the games will be played in a best-of-one format, and the whole 1x6 groupstage will take two full days to run, before we head into the playoffs on Sunday. The schedule is rather forgiving, only with six hours of game time per day.
The playoffs on the other hand, has no set schedule and will start at 03:00 CEST on Sunday. Games will be played one after another.
Format
The format of the tournament will follow a 1x6 groupstage into an unorthodox playoff round. In the groupstage, the six qualified teams will be placed into one group in which they will have to play a best-of-one round robin throughout the first and second days. The playoffs will follow a "Bubble Race" mechanism and it looks like the following:
Bubble Race
Assuming:
Team A: 1st
Team B: 2nd
Team C: 3rd
Team D: 4th
Match A: Team D vs Team C
Match B: Winner of Match A vs Team B
Match C: Winner of Match B vs Team A
All stars game
G-1 League will be hosting an exhibition All-Stars game to kick-off their 2013 season between the best of the Chinese and the best of the "World". The game is set to begin at 04:00 CEST on Friday.
The participants of the All-Stars game were picked by the community on the official G-1 website a few days ago. In case you have missed the announcement, too bad. The voting is now closed and here are your participants.
Chinese All-Stars
"World" All-Stars
You will be watching...
The G-1 league offline finals will be casted in three languages: Chinese, Russian and English. While the official broadcast with live footage from the Riverside Sports Center will of course be in Chinese on the 17173 stream, three international streams will also be provided: ?
As the Eastern Qualifiers for The International take a break for the G-1 Finals, BeyondTheSummit is having their main casters and stream available for the first English broadcast. As throughout the Asian and Western G-1 qualifier, Ayesee will also provide an English commentary. For the Russian speaking audience, v1lat will stream the G-1 Final matches on the StarLadder stream.
To China and beyond
Arrival in Shanghai and G-1 League
Our project developer, Mathias 'dopeshow' Schmedeshagen and yours truly will be in China courtesy of GIGABYTE, for the weekend, to bring you updates and live interviews straight from JiangWan Sports Centre (if we don't get lost that is). Both of us will arrive in Shanghai by noon tomorrow and hopefully be able to get some blogs going, assuming the Internet connection is working in our hotel.
We will also be heading down to the venue to have a chat with some of the professional players participating over dinner before we head to bed in preparation for the epic event.
After G-1 League
If you have not heard, we will also be staying a few extra days in Shanghai. What will we be doing? Oh nothing unusual, just visiting LGD, Vici Gaming and Invictus Gaming. We will be filming how these players train to maintain such high level of play and perhaps top it off with an interview or two. Who would you like us to interview? Tell us in the comments section down below.
GIGABYTE Gosubet contest
GosuBet your way to a new graphics card on the G-1 League. In this tournament, your branches do not matter because it is the total number of correct bets that decide if you rank higher than others. The person with the highest amount of correct bets will win these awesome goodies. BRANCHES DO NOT MATTER. With the round robin groupstage and the bubble race format, we will have a total of 18 matches to bet on (19 if all-stars is included). In case of equal count of correct bets, a random winner will be drawn. You can find all the G-1 Matches in the "Upcoming Matches" box on the right side of our coverage hub.
More information on the products is available HERE.
1st prize: GIGABYTE GV-R785OC-2GD Graphics Card
>> WINDFORCE™ 2X: Anti-turbulence Cooling
>> Powered by AMD Radeon HD 7850 GPU
>> Integrated with the first 2GB GDDR5 memory and 256-bit memory interface
>> Overclock to 975 MHz
>> Support AMD Eyefinity Technology and Avivo™HD
2nd prize: GIGABYTE Aivia Osmium Mechanical Gaming Keyboard:
>> Superior CHERRY MX Mechanical Key-Switch
>> USB3.0 SuperSpeed extension port
>> Full-range anti-ghosting capability
>> Built-in GHOSTTM macro engine
>> Adjustable keyboard illumination
3rd prize: GIGABYTE Aivia Krypton
>> Advanced real 8200 DPI resolution laser sensor
>> Hot-swappable Mouse Chassis
>> Customizable center of gravity to fit your best hand balancer
>> Built-in GHOST™ macro engine, 70macros on the go
Vote vote vote!
