IEM Katowice’s StarCraft 2 leg begins on February 23. Star players around the world will gather to battle for the $500,000 prize pool after the conclusion of the group stage in the most important SC2 tournament of the year.
Who qualified this year
All of the bigshots are here: The champion of IEM Katowice 2021 Reynor of Team QLASH, last year’s 2nd and 3rd place Zest and Maru, and of course the all time fan favourite, queen of StarCraft Scarlett – irrespective of her last place standing last year, she’s still a big name that has won the IEM Katowice 2018.
Maru, Reynor and Serral qualified from winning the 2021 DH Masters.
Last year's 3rd place Maru currently has the most ESL points among the other players with a total of 3185, and that might be a hint of who’s coming after the championship cup this year.
Compared to his stats, 21's winner Italian Reynor surprisingly has only 1914 points.
From winning a 2021 GSL Code S:
- Cure
- Dar
- Rogue
From the South Korea Standings:
- Trap
- Bunny
- Solar
- Zest
- Dream
From the Europe Europe Standings
- ShoWTimE
- Clem
- Lambo
- HeRoMaRinE
From the North America North America Standings
- Neeb
- Scarlett
From the South America Latin America Standings
- SpeCial
From the China China Standings
- TIME
From the World Combined Standings
- Zoun
Other pros and known names that cannot attend the event are:
- Stats, INnoVation, PartinG, TY, and Patience are fulfilling their mandatory military service at the time of the Global Finals and hence can not qualify.
- sOs retired.
- MarineLorD, MaxPax, Hurricane, and Keen declined their invites.
StarCraft 2 players with highest points
| # | Player | EPT Points |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maru | 3185 |
| 2 | Rogue | 2937 |
| 3 | Trap | 2897 |
| 4 | Serral | 2670 |
| 5 | Clem | 2536 |
| 6 | Dark | 2397 |
| 7 | Cure | 2153 |
| 8 | Zest | 1976 |
| 9 | Reynor | 1914 |
| 10 | HeRoMaRinE | 1573 |
What’s next?
We hope we’ll see new names push through for the top 3 standings, or maybe some quality comeback from the older ones –Hey Scarlett, we are talking about you–, this year.
Last year’s champ Reynor has performed relatively poorly throughout the ESL circuit of 2021/2022 and when it comes to StarCraft the skill level is so high up the ceiling that it’s impossible to guess who’s going to win.
Strategy games constantly evolve in tactics and metas and we hope that we’ll also see some new gameplay at this year’s major event.
We’ll follow up on this article with odds and predictions just before the beginning of the group stage. Be sure to stay tuned.
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