Sunday night saw the conclusion to Polarfluke: Released - the biggest ever Starcraft 2 tournament held in South Africa. With over 100 people registered for the tournament, the event has set a great standard for the South African SC2 scene, and South African gaming in general.






The event was covered by a live video stream, hosted by our friends at 4pooled.com - a first for any SC2 event in South Africa. Besides a live video feed, Mitarn also did a simultaneous audio stream of the video stream, available to gamers who couldn't watch the video stream. This was a fantastic way to cover the event, and all other online tournament organizers should take note of this. It certainly adds a whole other dynamic to the way that spectators can be introduced to competitive gaming in this country.

Group Stages

The event started off with group stages which were completed on Saturday afternoon, which saw a great turnout considering 101 players registered for the event. There were no real upsets within the group stages, and all the players that were predicted to go through to the single elimination did just that.

Single Elimination Stage

The business end of the tournament saw the 32 players which advanced from the group stages duke it out in a single elimination, best of 3 scenario. The event delivered some real good games, in particular those played during the semi finals, third and fourth place, and grand final matches. Gamers are highly recommended to grab the replay packs of the tournament. The replays should be up on bravadogaming.com real soon.

Results

The tournament saw a repeat of a couple of games that were played at the Megarom exhibition event of last week, in particularly the final which saw a rematch between Shase and AngryAfrican. This time AngryAfrican proved to be too strong for Shase, beating him with a score of 3-1 in the best of 5 set.


The single elimination brackets. Image courtesy of Polarfluke.co.za
A bigger version of the image can be found here

The full results for the competition were as follows:

1st: ANRGYAFRICAN - Ventus
2nd: Shase - Bravado
3rd: Kreeflewer - Mint
4th: Dreamer - Ventus
5th - 8th: Rubilac Mint
5th - 8th: skillbill
5th - 8th: Infinity
5th - 8th: McNoob

The top four placed players won AMD processors, whilst the 5th - 8th placed players all receive 10 GB prepaid bandwidth accounts sponsored by Afrihost.


Conclusion

The event was extremely well organized by the Polarfluke crew. On behalf of Bravado, I would like to thank Fluke, Alcardu, and Bluumz for their great effort to organize a tournament of this size. We would also like to mention the shoutcasters once more for their great efforts in covering SC2 events in the country. A word of thanks also goes out to the sponsors (AMD, Afrihost, and ESZ) and the fantastic prizes which they sponsored for the tournament.

On a personal note, it was a blast to participate in the tournament. It was really well organized and I am really looking forward to more events hosted by the Polarfluke crew.

Once again we would like to remind gamers that they can join #starcraft2 on za.shadowfire.org to participate in any SC2 discussion, and to stay in touch with community events.