Starcraft 2: WCS Europe Season 1 group play kicks off tonight

With the qualifiers now finished, the 32 players competing in the first season of the European leg of Starcraft 2's World Championship Series have been announced. The pros have been split into eight groups, with each group battling on a different night over the next three weeks. The first group - featuring SaSe, ForGG, sLivko and Bunny - kick things off tonight, from 6pm CEST/5pm BST.

Each group will fight five best-of-three matches, using the following format :

Player #1 vs. Player #4
Player #2 vs. Player #3
Winners of these matches will then face each other
The losers of the initial matches face each other
The loser of the 3rd match and the winner of the 4th match will face each other

The two players to win two games overall will move forward to the 16-player second stage, with the losers dropping to the Challenger League.

Play will continue tomorrow, with the Group B battles, then resume next week with Groups C-E fighting from Tuesday to Thursday. See the full timetable and player list below:

You can watch the WCS, for free, at the official WCS Europe stream . Do any of the upcoming match-ups take your fancy?

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Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.