One of StarCraft’s biggest events is kicking off today, with some of the top players competing. The Winter leg of ESL SC2 Masters 2023 has started up and we’re already seeing games take place. How has the ESL SC2 Masters 2023 Winter gone so far and what can we expect from the event?

Source: ESL, YouTube

ESL SC2 Masters 2023 Winter

Over December 15 to 17, we’ll see the latest Winter event take place for StarCraft’s ESL. With a $75,000 prize pool EPT Global Points at stake, this is one of our biggest StarCraft esports tournaments for the year with most of the best players here.

The event started off with an open stage of four brackets, before a winner’s stage narrows 16 down. The next stage is knockouts, before 8 players compete in a single elimination bracket. The winner takes away the lion’s share of the prize, but also 1,500 EPT Global Points. How has the tournament gone so far?

Open Stage

In the opening round, we’ve already seen some early games take place. We started things off with her0 facing Rhizer. Here her0 expectedly has a strong run, getting through at 2-0. The second match was closer, where MaNa took on DnS and won 2-1. Heading lower in the opening bracket we saw some players start to move down, with Nightmare and Creator sending Ukko and Mixu down to the lower bracket. There are still four more rounds to Bracket A before we move forward though.

The second part of the ESL Winter Open Stage is the Bracket B. Lambo, SHIN, DRG and Skillous have all made it through to the second round. In the Third Bracket, quite a few other of the best StarCraft players will be competing. There’s Bunny, trigger and more ready to play here. The fourth bracket is pretty stacked too, with HeRoMaRinE and Zain both competing here.

The ESL SC2 Masters 2023 Winter is a longer tournament with four different stages. We’ll see quite a few different rounds, but only player can walk away the winner.