The Starcraft 2 season is heating up. After a surprising west dominated IEM Katowice, we are heading into a much bigger and much longer event. We are of course talking about the Global Starcraft 2 League, the best place to watch season-based Starcraft.
GSL has to be one of the oldest leagues around as the first tournament in the league was organized in 2010. Since then, the league has been having a few seasons every year with a small change in organizers of the events here and there. In this season, we are already two groups down the line, with favorites dropping out early and new “old” names returning to glory.
But first, lets dig into the format and setup for this event.
Kim “Cure” Doh-wook
GSL 2022 Code S Format
The league uses something that might be considered a standard in the Starcraft seasonal tournaments, which is a Dual Tournament format that has been used in Starcraft since 2002. This format gives every player a second chance because once they lose their first game, they move onto the loser’s bracket, where they will have another shot to win the tournament. This, of course, is only for the first group stage, which is also a best of 3. It lets only two players from each group move onto group stage 2.
The second group stage features a round-robin format, where all players within the group are going to play between each other, and the 1st place moves onto Playoffs Semifinals while the 2nd and 3rd places in the group move onto the Round of 6 where the remaining players for Playoffs Semifinals will be decided.
Playoffs are the most exciting part of the event, as the matches now become a best of five in the semifinals, and the finals are best out of seven. If you are looking for the best of what Starcraft 2 has to offer, then watching the Playoffs is a must!
Players to watch!
Unfortunately, since this is a league that features Korean players, you will not be able to watch the IEM Katowice 2022 winner, Joona “Serral” Sotala, in action. However, there are still some fantastic players that you should keep an eye on.
The first player to keep an eye on is of course, Rogue. The winner of the AfreecaTV GSL Super Tournament 3 and bronze runner at IEM has something to prove this season. After losing out in Katowice, he is hoping to re-claim home region glory and try put Korea on top at the next international event.
While we would certainly like to mention all the extraordinary players that this league has to offer and their accomplishments, The Global Starcraft 2 League has just so many of them right now, and watching any match play out is bound to be entertaining.
However, Trap, Cure, RagnaroK, Solar should be one of the few advancing forward. This is of course if they don’t go the way of Dream and Zest in their groups.
Favorites face early elimination
Two big names have already been eliminated in the early group stages. Cho “Dream” Joong-hyuk and Joo “Zest” Sung-wook both fell out of their respective groups early on. They gave way to Park “DRG” Soo-ho and Kim “Ryung” Dong-won respectively.
Both DRG and Ryung are legends on the scene, but no pre-tournament analyst had them advancing over legends. The Starcraft betting markets may go out of whack if the favorites keep getting eliminated in the group stage. Either way, SC2 becoming a hot esports betting market is the best thing we can hope for this spring.
Competition at GSL 2022: Code S continues on March 28th.
