The brackets to determine the eight players of each region to advance to the offline finals got underway this Saturday.
Amidst the excitement around the ATLC finals, two other very important tournaments commenced rather unnoticed. The 40 best players in Europe and North America gave start to the online qualification round for the Blizzcon regional finals.
The top eight players in the Hearthstone World Championship (HWC) rankings were seeded directly into the third round of the winners bracket, which meant that they would not play until later this week. Nonetheless, there were quite a lot of matches to be played still as the first rounds of the winners and losers bracket were brought to streams.
In both Europe and North America there were little to no surprises in terms of how the match-ups turned out. Known names like Yevgeniy “Neirea” Shumilin, Thijs “ThijsNL” Molendijk and Damien “Yogg” L’hostis expectedly won their matches and will go on to play the top seeded players this coming weekend. The few upsets that happened in the European bracket are the fall of Jon “Orange” Westberg, Gareth “Cipher” Rouse, Simon “Crane” Raunholst and Jesper “Freakeh” Eriksson to the losers bracket, but all of the aforementioned are still in the tournament.
That’s not the case, however, for DreamHack Valencia champion James “Greensheep” Luo, one of the notable eliminations of the bracket. Greensheep lost the WBR2 match against ThijsNL and dropped to the losers bracket to suffer a loss to French player Tomof and will thus not be making a return BlizzCon appearance. It wasn’t a good day for GamersOrigin either, as both Un33d and Thefishou are out of the tournament.
A few upsets happened across the pond in the NA bracket as well. Notable representatives of the scene like Andrey “Reynad” Yanyuk and Matt “Dart” Orgel will have to prove themselves in the lower bracket, as they lost their opening matches. With the bracket progressing more slowly compared to EU, the fate of other high-profile competitors like George “Hyped” Magainzini, Cong “StrifeCro” Shu and Ryan “Purple” Murphy-Root remains to be decided.
For full picture of the two brackets, visit our World Championship 2015 coverage hub.
Notable eliminations
Greensheep
Thefishou
Un33d
Gameking
