A brief lull descends over the esports scene this weekend in the calm before next week’s storm. The LoL Worlds finals, Dota 2 Frankfurt Major, BlizzCon and CS:GO’s last Major of the year at DreamHack Cluj-Napoca all loom close on the horizon, so it seems only right to get some respite before then. Despite there being no trophies to hand out this weekend, there are still plenty of top flight games to tune into as both the CS:GO ESL ESEA Pro League and Dota DreamLeague seasons continue their early group round robin stages. And let’s not forget the penultimate stage of Worlds as the European road trip to the Summoner’s Cup draws to a close.
Here are the biggest esports fixtures of the weekend.
League of Legends Worlds 2015 Semifinals
Having shed all but four teams from their tour around Europe, the Riot banterbus rolls into Brussels this weekend for the semifinals. It’s a very EU affair, too, as Origen and Fnatic have made it through the gauntlet on opposite sides of the bracket, meaning a home continent derby finals is still on the cards. For that to happen, however, Origen would have to best SKT Telecom T1 who have been on striking form this season. And Fnatic will need to send home KOO Tigers, who staged a surprise coup against their Korean rivals KT Rolster who swiped the second seed spot from them in the playoffs. The quarters at Wembley were a bit of a whitewash, with three of four matches resulting in one-sided sweeps, but the talent seems closer in these matchups. Find out when Origen face SKT on Saturday at 07:30 PDT/15:30 BST, and KOO take on Fnatic Sunday at the earlier time of 05:30 PDT/12:30 GMT (watch out for that British daylight savings change, folks). You can catch it all on the official Riot Games Twitch or Azubu.
Counter-Strike: ESL ESEA Pro League Season 2
In the interim before Cluj-Napoca, you can catch HellRaisers, Titan, Ninjas in Pyjamas, TSM, Virtus.pro and EnVyUs in some regular season matches. This weekend’s specific matchups in the round robin pit all of the North American teams against one another over the course of two days. Starting from 15:00 PDT/23:00 BST until 20:00 PDT/03:00 GMT on Saturday night Cloud9, CLG, Team Liquid, EnemyGG and Coastless will face off against one another before repeating the matchups again on the Sunday. The rest of the European action takes course earlier each day, from 08:00 PDT/16:00 BST on the Saturday and 08:00 PDT/15:00 GMT on the Sunday. You can catch those on ESL’s Twitch channel.
Dota 2: DreamLeague Season 4
Another run-of-the-mill round robin bracket continues this weekend to determine who will get a crack at the $150,000 prize pool at November’s DreamHack Winter finals. Though the Frankfurt Major is around the same time, many of the invited and qualified teams are competing which has led to some clenchworthy finishes in recent games. Don’t be surprised to see scenes reminiscent of Alliance battling back against megacreeps to defeat NiP during the Major qualifiers. Matches begin at 04:30 PDT/12:30 BST on Saturday with 4CL versus Monkey Freedom Fighters and finish at 12:00 PDT/20:00 BST with MFF facing off against NiP. Catch the action on the DreamLeague Twitch channel.
Dota 2: The Summit 4 American Qualifiers
Sunday’s Dota fix comes in the form of The Summit 4’s American qualifiers, also Saturday’s, if you want to catch the winner’s bracket final of ROOT Gaming play Digital Chaos at 14:00 PDT/22:00 BST (which, of course, you do). Sunday’s matches represent the final chances in the loser’s bracket (14:00 PDT/21:00 BST) for Cloud9 and whoever survives today’s game between paiN Gaming and Elite Wolves. And after that, at 17:00 PDT/midnight GMT, Wizards & Priests will take on the victor’s of today’s compLexity versus Team Archon showdown. You can catch all of those games on Beyond The Summit.
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