UK’s Cordelia “Scarakye” Chui has finished third in the WESG Women Hearthstone Europe tournament.
She beat German player Kristin “Deela” Bender 3-0 in the third-place decider match, as outlined on the WESG website, and has progressed to the WESG Global Grand Finals which take place in China in March 2018.
Scarakye won $600 for finishing third, while Spanish first-place player Arya took home $3,000 and second-place Harleen from Russia received $1,200.
It’s been a beyond amazing experience and it wouldn’t have happened without @HrznDuncan, @TicTac_HS, @LorindaGames, @Glaser_HS & @WESGcom thank you everyone!!! ❤️ and thank you so much to everyone back at home who was watching & cheering for me, it really means a lot ☺️❤️
— Scarakye (@scarakye) November 25, 2017
Scarakye, Arya and Harleen all progress to the WESG Women’s Global Grand Finals which have a $51,000 prize pool and will feature eight finalists.
As well as a Hearthstone player, Scarakye is also a game design student and programmer, part-time social media manager, tournament admin and bartender at Meltdown London.
You can find out more about her in this interview:
Should WESG have tournaments separated by gender?
There has been some criticism on Reddit around WESG’s decision to divide its esports tournaments into separate men’s and women’s competitions, and the lack of prize pool parity between the two.
For example, the WESG Women Hearthstone Europe tournament had a $4,800 prize pool, while the men’s had a $34,000 prize pool. In the global finals, this extends to $51,000 and $300,000 respectively.
That means the women’s tournaments have a prize pool around six times lower than the men’s.
You could look at this both ways, however, and either argue for having one bigger prize pool for a single mixed-gender tournament instead, or to have tournaments separated by gender as above, in order to promote more female esports players in an industry which is male-dominant.
“As a temporary solution I think all-female tournaments are great, as long as you’re not excluding women from playing in general tournaments. It’s a good step up to what we’re trying to achieve – that one day we’ll have just as many female competitive gamers as males, and I think that’s true.”
Scarakye
When asked about this topic, Scarakye said in the interview above: “I played in a couple of all-female League of Legends tournaments a little while back and I found that a really good experience.
“There’s a preconception that female gamers aren’t as competitive or don’t have an interest in playing at that level, I don’t think that’s true, I think we just don’t encourage women as much to do those things.
“I think that in an ideal world, you’d have tournaments everyone could play in and have a 50/50 distribution of males and females, but the reason we’re not at that stage yet is because gaming in general is kind of a male-dominated space that women don’t either feel comfortable in or haven’t discovered it yet.
“As a temporary solution I think all-female tournaments are great, as long as you’re not excluding women from playing in general tournaments. It’s a good step up to what we’re trying to achieve – that one day we’ll have just as many female competitive gamers as males, and I think that’s true.
It’s great to see a UK finalist in the women’s global finals – and we wish Scarakye the best of luck in China next year.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
