European Challenger Circuit: Poland kicks off with great LoL action eSports Central

The European Challenger Circuit: Poland is a very important event for the Europeans because it has a direct effect on the seeding for the Season 2 European Regionals at Cebit next month. So far, Moscow Five have already locked down the top spot but the rest are up for grabs. Going into today the standings looked like this:

Moscow Five	1000 points
CLG EU	450 points
FnaticRC	385 points
SK Gaming	310 points
Curse EU	125 points

Below is a table taken from the League of Legends website that tells how much each position in ECC Poland is worth:

• 1st $15,000 - 400 Circuit Points
• 2nd $10,000 - 200 Circuit Points
• 3rd $5,000 - 125 Circuit Points
• 4th $2.800 - 75 Circuit Points
• 5th-6th $2,000 - 50 Circuit Points
• 7th-8th $1,600 - 50 Circuit Points

As you can see even Curse EU has a chance to get up to second place but they have two giants standing in their way.

Group A

Acer.pl came into ECC Poland with a few prominent figures singing their praises and it was believable after their first game against Meet Your Makers. Acer was able to beat up on their fellow countrymen with a kill score of 22 to 3 but the 52 total assists tell the greater story. Acer had fantastic teamwork and their aggression was spot on. However, the next two games would not tell the same story.

The game against Curse EU was really weird. Acer decided to do some unorthodox lane switches to where it was Graves versus Morgana in the top lane, Taric / Jax versus Ezreal / Alistar in the middle lane, and Orianna versus Vladimir in the bottom lane. The game was really close but Acer started to get greedy in their plays and Curse made them pay for it. Angush and Sleper ruled the team fights while xinec and Malunoo made life a living hell for Acer's carries. Sleper ended up finishing the game 10/2/8.

Acer wasn't out of contention for the semi-finals. All they had to do was beat SK Gaming. A task that is easier said than done. Unfortunately for the Polish team they lost the game during the picks and bans when SK was able to pick a team whose whole purpose was to protect the Kog'Maw. Acer had no answer. YellOwStar is one of the best positioners in the game and he will destroy the opposition when his team gives him layer after layer of protection. He absolutely demolished Acer going 7/1/13 while his other teammates did just as good: Ocelote - 7/0/12, Nyph - 0/4/19, Araneae - 2/3/19, and kev1n - 7/2/12.

Acer is still a young team and they will be able to take this as a learning experience as the Intel Extreme Masters will be kicking off in August.

Curse and SK Gaming move onto the semi-finals and await the top two finishers from Group B. Curse looked incredibly strong with Angush back in the lineup. SK Gaming looked like the new additions of Araneae (Jungle) and YellOwStar (AD) are going to work out splendidly. Personally, I have a theory that YellOwStar is so talented that his team can't help but be successful but one thing is for certain, Nyph needs to learn how to play a great Leona.

Group B

Before we get to CLG EU and their decimation of the group, we should talk about one of the cooler stories of the weekend. One of the teams that qualified couldn't get the funding to make it; they are a Spanish team called x6tence. Ocelote, being a fellow Spaniard, decided to sponsor the team and funded the trip to Warsaw which is why there is a team call OceloteWorld in this tournament. It is just nice to shine a light on the good that happens in this community.

Back to the slaughter.

CLG EU is on fire and some might say they are the best in the world right now. Their picks are fantastic, their teamfights are impeccable, and they have great team decision making skills. Personally, I am leaning towards placing them in that #1 spot.

The group consisted of: Moscow Five, CLG EU, EloHell (Veggie and Shushei's team), and OceloteWorld. Everyone believed that it would be Moscow Five and CLG EU making it out of this group. So when it came time for the CLG EU versus Moscow Five match, the 100,000 fans watching knew this would be for 1st place and the chance to play SK Gaming in the next round.

The game was even for the most part because of a lane switch that didn't work out for either of the bruisers. Darien fed Yellowpete like he was having him over for a holiday meal. However, Wickd wasn't doing much better against Genja and Gosu Pepper. In fact, if Wickd could have kept up with Darien in farm, the game would have ended much sooner.

A baron fight sealed the fate of the game for Moscow Five. They were attempting baron but CLG decided to contest it. M5 continued to chunk down baron while CLG was hacking away at them. Diamondprox ended up walking away with the baron buff but CLG ended up with the ace (a Froggen quadra-kill). From here, every team fight got worse and worse for the Russians. Froggen got ridiculously fed and ended the game with 14 kills; M5 couldn't do anything with that kind of area damage coming at them. If you take away Alex Ich from Moscow Five, the rest of the team went -15 in kill to death differential for the game. Overall, CLG EU just outplayed Moscow Five in every aspect of the game.

CLG went on to defeat EloHell 32 to 6 in their third game. I believe in traditional sports we call that padding the stats.

The semi-finals take place tomorrow at 10:00 Warsaw time, 4:00 AM EST, and 1 AM PST. The matchups are:

Curse EU versus Moscow Five

CLG EU versus SK Gaming

Follow all the action at esl.tv.

More eSports Headlines