Tonight marks the beginning of the new ESL cup series, King of the Hill. After it was postponed for a week on August 2nd due to server instability, it is planned to launch tonight with a four-team single elimination tournament.
compLexity, Sodipop, Liquid, and Selfless feature in the cup seeded one to four respectively. These teams will be fighting for $1,000, and more importantly the title of King of the Hill. This team will return the following Tuesday to defend its title in a 1-on-1 with a challenger for another $1,000. For a successful team that can dominate, the prizes will begin to mount up.
The challengers each week will be selected in a single elimination tournament on the previous Saturday. Further details can be found on the ESL website for King of the Hill, or in their description below:
ESL King of the Hill for Overwatch is a weekly tournament series set to start on August 2. Each Saturday, ESL will hold a single elimination open qualifier that follows a pre-selected map pool. At the quarterfinals, the competition will transition into best of three matches, and the grand finals will be best of five. The winners of this open cup will advance to Tuesday’s main event where they will battle an invited team in the hopes of challenging the reigning champions to take their title and win the weekly $1000 prize.
For the moment ESL are only running these events for North America. It is unknown whether they intend to expand to cover Europe as well; one would expect the North American region to be the worse choice for this format given its incredibly dominant team EnVyUs, who haven't been included in the initial tournament.
The tournaments will be streamed on ESL's Twitch channel. Tune in tonight to see the first King of the Hill crowned.