ESL Summer – Regionals Round-Up + Format Explainer

by Wax

The Summer Season of ESL Masters will come to a close this weekend (June 16-18), with the top players in the world gathering for the championship at the classic StarCraft II venue of DreamHack: Summer.

To get everyone ready for the tournament, here’s a review of the regional qualifiers that determined the sixteen seeded players and a breakdown of the new ESL Masters format that will be used for the first time.

As before, the EPT regionals decided which sixteen players earned paid flights to the main event, as well as very advantageous initial seeding (more on this in the format section).

However, there were some big changes in the structure of the regionals, with the previous six regions being consolidated into three. Europe remained its own region, Latin America and North America were merged into a single “Americas” region, while the China, Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau/Japan, and Oceania/Rest of Asia regions were merged into a single “Asia” region.

This caused some slight reallocation of main event seeds, with the three previous ‘minor’ region seeds (LATAM, Taiwan, Oceania) being replaced by “combined standings” seeds awarded based on the EPT point standings. Due to the way ESL structured the point distributions throughout the regionals, it effectively gave two of these seeds to Korea (7th-8th place) and the remaining one to Asia (2nd place).

In terms of format, the regionals changed to begin with Swiss-style groups, followed by a single elimination tournament in the playoffs. The eventual champions ended up being familiar regional powerhouses, but the earlier rounds produced a few surprises due to the change from double to single elimination.

Seed winners: Serral, Clem, Spirit, Reynor

It might be shocking to hear, but Serral won only his second EPT Europe regional title this season. Clem, for all his international troubles, has had EPT Europe on lockdown, winning the five out of nine regionals so far (Reynor has won two). This time around, Serral got the better of his continental nemesis, eking out a 3-2 victory in the semifinals before going on to claim the championship.

The runner-up prize went to MaxPax, who achieved his best ever major tournament result in the process. Alas, much to the lament of Protoss players, he seems committed to remaining an online-only player during these trying times, and declined his invite to the main event in Sweden.

The single elimination playoffs gave us some early casualties, with both ShoWTimE and HeroMarine being knocked out in the first round (vs MaxPax and Spirit, respectively). While the seeding will be more evened out when the next EPT regional comes along, the number of highly-skilled players in Europe means that we’re probably guaranteed at least one brutal RO16 elimination match each season.

Replacement Bracket

With MaxPax declining his spot at the main event, a mini-tournament was held between the 5th-8th place finishers to decide who would receive the fourth and final seed out of Europe. Reynor prevailed in this competition, beating SKillous and Lambo.

Group Stage Results:
+ Show Spoiler [Click to show] +

Seed winners: Astrea and Scarlett

The merging of North America and Latin America definitely made this combined region more competitive, giving us a strong top four of Kelazhur, Scarlett, SpeCial, and Astrea. Unfortunately for Latin American fans, their region ended up being one of the victims of the merger as neither Kelazhur nor SpeCial could reach the grand finals to win a DreamHack seed.

The finals came down to the very familiar NA match-up between Astrea and Scarlett, with the American Protoss coming out on top. With Neeb out of the picture to pursue his studies, this may become a recurring Americas finals fixture going forward.

Group Stage Results:
+ Show Spoiler [Click to show] +

Update:It appears that Oliveira and Coffee will be unable to attend due to a visa issue.

Seed winner: Oliveira*

The merging of the three ‘minor’ Pacific regions showed that China was the mightiest among them, with players from the old Chinese region claiming six out of eight playoff spots. It was an obvious conclusion, then, that China’s hyper-dominant champion Oliveira would win the inaugural EPT Asia event as well.

Second place went to Coffee, who proved his runner-up finish in the last Chinese regional was no fluke by taking down Nice and Firefly on his way to the finals. Due to the high point allotment to the EPT Asia runner-up, Coffee earned a seeded spot at DreamHack Summer based on the combined standings.

Group Stage Results:
+ Show Spoiler [Click to show] +

Seed winners: Maru, Cure, ByuN, Bunny, Classic, Dark

Code S Season 1 saw Maru further cement his status as the greatest GSL player ever by winning a record sixth Code S championship.

As mentioned above, the ESL point system basically made it so all top eight players from Korea earned seeded spots at DreamHack Summer, not just the top six. However, one notable player still managed to miss out on getting a seed, despite this very generous allocation. DH: Atlanta champion herO was the casualty in the RO16 group of death, getting eliminated in third place by Cure and Solar.

The open bracket participants haven’t been revealed at this time, so we don’t know whether or not herO is attending. In the worst case scenario, both MaxPax and herO could miss out on this event, leaving Protoss in dire need of championship-tier representation.

Group Stage Results:
+ Show Spoiler [Click to show] +

The main event format of ESL Masters has been significantly changed, swapping out the old, convoluted format for another that’s just a little less complex.

For the hardcore fans who actually had a good understanding of the old system used from WCS 2019 to EPT 2022, then there’s a simple way to explain 90% of the changes: all GSL-style groups have been replaced by 8-player double elimination brackets. Other than that, the various phases of the tournament and how they feed into the knockout bracket are very similar.

For everyone else, I’ll try my best to explain the new format in its totality, in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re reading the world’s worst IKEA instructions.

Day 1 (June 16)

Seeding Stage

• 16 players: Top players from regional qualifiers + EPT point standings
• 2x eight-player double elimination brackets
• Top two players from each bracket (four total) qualify directly for the RO8 playoffs
• 3rd-8th place players (12 total) are seeded into knockout bracket according to their placement
• Oliveira and Coffee are unable to attend due to a visa issue, and it is yet undecided how they will be replaced.

Seeding Stage bracket #1

Seeding Stage bracket #2

Open Stage

• 32 players: From open sign-ups
• 4x eight-player double elimination brackets
• Top two players from each bracket (eight total) advance to the knockout bracket (seeded into lowest round of knockout bracket)

Open Stage Bracket example (players TBA)

Day 2 (June 17)

Knockout Stage

• 20 players: 12 from the Seeding Stage + 8 from the Open Stage
• 4x King of the hill/gauntlet style brackets
• Winner of each gauntlet bracket (four total) advances to the playoffs
• Gauntlet brackets seeded according to the results from day 1, with open stage winners starting at the bottom of the bracket

Knockout Stage seeding example

Day 3 (June 18)

Playoffs

• 8 players: 4 Seeding Stage winners + 4 Knockout Stage winners
• Eight-player single elimination tournament

Playoff Seeding Example

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• Source: https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/612810-esl-summer-regionals-round-up-format-explainer