World cup for Esports?

WESG – World Electronic Sports Games is an Esports championship tournament based in Shanghai and organized by AliSports.

The tournament features many different popular Esports like CS:GO, Dota 2, Starcraft 2, Hearthstone or even PES 2019.

Wesg Less Strict 01
The event also features a standalone PES 2019 tournament

The World Electronic Sports Games heavily bases itself on the Olympic Games. There are even tournaments exclusive for women.

Wesg Less Strict 02
Women have their own competition

The tournament boasts a large prize pool of $890,000 in 2018 and 1,500,000 in 2017 just in CS:GO

Due to the nature of the Olympic Games, the tournament specifies that all teams must fill players of the same nationality to emphasize national pride. However, the organizer of the tournament announced that there will be rule changes for the upcoming tournament.

Wesg Less Strict 03
The Natus Vincere star - electronic (rightmost) had to mix up with some other Russian players

What is new?

Teams can now include 2 foreigners in the team. This opens the window for squads with mixed players like Team Liquid, Natus Vincere, BIG, and Vitality to join in the competition.

Wesg Less Strict 04
With 2 Canadian players, can Team Liquid attend the tournament this time?

WESG is like the world championship for some Esports, as they feature 5 players in the squad from the same nationality. However, with the last year’s strict rules, many top CS:GO teams failed to comply with the rule and missed out the tournament.

Last year’s WESG featured only MIBR, fnatic, and G2 among the top 10 teams. The matchups were extremely one-sided and boring to watch. The only real competition only took place in the playoffs where top teams remained.

Wesg Less Strict 05
Though being the heavy favorite to win, MIBR failed to perform in China

Valiance was a good team coming to the tournament but had to use 2 stand-ins according to the rules. They dropped significantly in performance with the absence of Rokas “EspiranTo “ Milasauskas and Otto “ottoNd” Sihvo who turned out to be Lithuanian and Finnish respectively. With 2 stand-ins in the team, it was obvious that they could not deploy strategies well as they could with their main players.

Now that the change is implemented, the tournament can attract more attention and crowd with its higher level of competition.

The organizers have yet to announce the official date and venue. However, it should be in early next year according to the schedule of last time.