New eSports News UK writer Henry Millman takes a look at the Halo UK finals taking place this weekend, who the favourites are and what else to expect.
With the release of Halo 5, developer 343 Industries promised to continue Halo eSports through the Halo World Championship, a development from the Halo Championship Series (HCS).
In the past, teams would qualify by acquiring enough “HCS Points” through online and offline tournaments. At the end of the season, the top eight teams would attend the finals where they had the opportunity to dip into a large prize pool.
This system was used until the end of season 2 (2015), when the new Halo World Championship, boasting a large $2 million prize pool, took over.
Now, qualifiers to the new World Championship are split into the different regions: NA, EU and the Middle East, ANZ, Latin America and Asia. As the EU and Middle East region has so many different nations within it, there are further splits with the UK, Germany and France all getting separate qualifiers to the rest of the region.
The UK finals take place this weekend (Friday January 15th to Sunday 17th), with 16 teams battling it out. The top four teams will earn themselves a spot at the EMEA regional finals.
The teams will compete for the title of UK and ROI Champion; with a £10,000 prize pool.
THE TEAMS
Epsilon Halo (who lead the pack, after beating Team Infused last weekend) are coming into the UK finals after managing to place first at all but one of the UK qualifiers, leading to a 4,060-point lead over Vibe, who are also far ahead of third place Team Infused by 4,000 points.
The favourites for the tournament are clearly Epsilon after their return to the top following the recent UK qualifier #4. However, if Vibe get themselves back to the best of their ability, they could get themselves a win after they went without dropping a single map in the UK qualifier #4.
As we go further down the team list, we see just how far ahead the top four are, with The Ground-Pound being a total of 14,705 points below Epsilon. However there is the possibility of an upset with lower-end teams, as even if they went out in the first round in the most recent qualifier, they have the chance to study the most recent games from the top seeds and formulate strategies to directly counter and take the better teams by storm.
Check out the results from the most recent qualifier below, and check out the official Halo World Championship series website.
The finals will take place at the Gfinity Arena and will be streamed on Gfinity’s Twitch channel.
More details are over on the Gfinity website
