The DreamHack Winter 2012 League of Legends has just been announced! Eight of the worlds best teams will compete for the 330 000 SEK prize (around €40,000) at DreamHack Winter 2012. The first two teams will be invited, while the other six teams need to fight their way through the online and BYOC qualifiers. The online qualifiers are split up by two regions: west and east. The first couple of qualifiers have been played at the eleventh of November.
League of Legends tournaments are getting more and more attention the last half year. With massive prize pools and online viewer numbers, League of Legends has became a bigshot in the E-Sports scene. Just last month, Taipei assassins won $1,000,000 in the Season 2 World Championship. This prize shows how big League of Legends has grown in the past year.
The Favorites
The first invited team will be Counter Logic Gaming.EU. Counter Logic Gaming.EU is the reigning DreamHack champion and is one of the big favorites this DreamHack. Last Summer, CLG.EU took down Moscow Five with relative ease to crown themselves DreamHack champion. Unfortunately, Moscow Five declined the invite as runner up’s for DreamHack Winter 2012.
Curse.EU gaming will replace Moscow Five as the second invited team at DreamHack Winter. Curse just recently won the Tales of the Lane tournament 2-1 over Eclypsia. This might give them a confidence boost to push to the top 2 at DreamHack Winter, as they finished 3rd at DreamHack Summer. With new players like SuperAZE and Creaton fulfilling the support and AD roles, Curse.EU surely has a shot at the DreamHack Winter 2012 finals.
FnaticRC is the first team that qualified through the online qualifiers. Fnatic has been going through some changes recently, with a lot of players leaving and joining the team. They didn’t seem shaken up after the big changes and placed 1st in the ASUS ROG tournament, at the Paris Games Week 2012.
Team Acer is the last team we will be covering in this preview. The German team qualified via the online west qualifiers by beating teams like Fureur and Alternate. Team Acer hasn’t had any big results the past year, except their third place in the World E-Sports Masters 2012. They added some new players in their roster last month, so maybe they are capable of placing high at DreamHack Winter. They will need a really good day to beat teams like CLG and Curse though.
The Packers
LowLandLions has been dominating the Benelux scene lately, with dozens of wins in weekly and monthly Benelux cups and even some bigger offline events. They’ve placed second in Frag-O-Matic, won The-Party 10 and I43 and also took 3rd place in I45. However, this doesn’t mean that LLL is one of the favorites this DreamHack. LLL needs to compete for one of the two BYOC spots, and getting in the main tournament would probably be a big achievement for the Benelux team. LLL will join the tournament as the underdog, which is a decent position for the team.
The DreamHack League of Legends Championship is looking to be an epic tournament. Big teams like CLG and Curse only strengthen this expectation. With a prize pool of 330,000 SEK or around €40,000, this tournament certainly is one of the bigger tournaments at DreamHack Winter 2012, and we are looking forward to it.
