Things can be tough for rookie players—especially if they're also on rookie teams. Every play is scrutinized, every failure a trigger for harsh rebuke by the peanut gallery. They're forced to operate in the shadows, fodder for highlight reels as their more veteran and popular counterparts dismantle them before a public audience.

Some are lucky enough to make it big almost immediately. Team Liquid's Dardoch is already in the running for North America's top jungler, for instance. Unicorns' Rudy is tearing things up across the Atlantic, with a Kindred that makes mockery of experience. And then there are the Faker moments. The once-in-a-lifetime outburst of talent, obvious upon their very debut, that subsequently take the world by storm.

But not everybody can be Faker. And not being Faker doesn't mean being unworthy. The major and well-respected players of tomorrow had to start somewhere, and often they start in the most humble of conditions. Losing teams but stalwart individual performances are the hallmarks of those that can yet be fostered to greatness, and these are some of the players with the potential for more than what they've currently shown.

Sencux

The Splyce roster in general suffers a lot from being basically a team's worth of rookies, but have shown glimmers of improvement as weeks progressed. Chres "Sencux" Laursen, one of the youngest players in the circuit, has shown some particularly interesting stunts.

Obviously, his LeBlanc against the Giants was great. That's not really any credit—anybody can beat the Giants right now. But even as Splyce lost the game against front-runner H2K, Sencux's Ahri was oddly menacing. Brave flanks, deep into the enemy back line, proved themselves well-timed and punishing.

But that does raise a question: is he an assassins-only mid laner, like so many other flash-in-the-pan mids? The champion archetype tends to be the most visually impressive, but also most meta-dependent, of the various mid lane strategic options. Sencux's Lulu was fairly dismal against G2, suggesting he doesn't quite have as solid a grasp on playing a utility-oriented role.

Nuclear

Kim "Nuclear" Seung-hoo does not deserve his team. Or, rather, SBENU Sonicboom does not deserve to have an AD carry of his caliber. Korea's bottom-rankers have an AD carry that routinely out-farms and out-fights his rivals on other teams—but to what result? It's not as if Flawless or SaSin can capitalize off his efforts.

That third game against Em-Fire was tragedy writ large. Nuclear's Lucian was an 11-0-10 beast, fully decked out with six items, boasting a 70 CS lead over Ssol, and a major reason why the game was nearly an entire hour long. Too bad, then, that the rest of his team were so far behind their own counterparts by every conceivable measure. Despite his best efforts, Nuclear is on a team that is completely winless by week four. Somebody give the poor guy a break.

Rokenia

Three different nations can lay claim to Hong Kong Esports' newest mid laner's recent proof of talent. Jeon "Rokenia" Yeong-dae is a South Korean pro player who debuted in Japan's wildcard circuit, only to get scouted and bought by Taiwan's Gash Bears Challenger team before the start of the LoL Master Series' second season. Except that the Gash Bears turned out to be a bit of a wreck—despite its roster of veterans and hired guns, it was dismantled messily by four rookies led by former Logitech Sniper jungler Yo.

Note that the Snipers fell apart quickly, Yo's a no-name compared to the rest of Taiwan's junglers, and they still made Rokenia look like no big deal. Yet somebody at Hong Kong Esports must have thought the guy still had something to prove, and their investment looks like it's paying off.

It's way too much to claim that Rokenia's competitive for the LMS's top ranks. AHQ is "cheating" by having both Chawy and Westdoor, Maple's Zed is going to be even more frightening come Patch 6.3, and Machi's Apex is the next big thing. On the other hand, Rokenia's showing that most important trait among premier region rookies: instead of melting under the pressure, he's improving under the challenge that Taiwan's already high-caliber mid lane game's imposed on him.

The fact that he has HKE jungler DinTer to guide and foster him is almost karmic: DinTer's now easily one of the region's best junglers, but started as a Taipei Assassins player routinely mocked for bad ults, bad mechanics, and bad shotcalling. DinTer, in fact, is proof that even the worst players now can become the real deal in a year or two. So long as they're given a chance to grow and learn, and so long as they have the will and determination to do so despite the jeers and the scorn, it's actually impossible to predict where their ultimate skill ceiling lies.

All you can really do is keep watch, and give them a chance.

Greg Street, the lead game designer at League of Legends studio Riot Games, recently spent some time answering questions over at Ask.FM about such things as game design, the nature of Amumu, what kind of music he's listening to, and why LoL has such a bad tutorial.

It covers a lot of ground, as AMAs tend to, but the bit about the tutorial is particularly illuminating. Street acknowledged that the current tutorial isn't very good in response to a question which cited Dota 2 and Heroes of the Storm as offering easier ways in, but said that improving it is not as high a priority as many of the other things we need to improve in the game.

We don't want to shift resources to features mostly aimed at attracting new players when we could be adding or improving features for existing players, he wrote. That's probably not the strategy a brand new game would choose, because new games really need to focus on building up an audience. We have a good-sized audience, and our highest priority is meeting their needs.

Improving the tutorial is on the things to do list, because we know it makes it that much harder to convince friends to try League. But, he added, We think improving the 1-30 experience outside of tutorials is a higher priority for us, specifically the length of the grind, the underwhelming celebration of milestones, and the power discrepancy for runes and masteries.

Street added that he was, at that moment, listening to the Assassin's Creed soundtrack.

Six months is a long time to go without a steady gig, but former AAA predictive modeler Jason Park had an itch to scratch that his old job wasn t fulfilling. The man behind Theorycraftr.com wanted a way to democratize analytics for the League of Legends community—even if it meant learning everything about engineering the software to do so from the ground up.

The inspiration for Theorycraftr was simple: a commonly-expressed desire for a comprehensive theorycrafting tool from the large League of Legends community on Reddit. "I wanted to learn new technologies," says Park. "I wanted to do something that I really enjoy. My inspiration was the subreddit—a lot of comments mentioning that they wished they had a champion-building tool. I thought that would be the perfect project or excuse to start learning everything I wanted to learn."

Park was also motivated by the limitations of his old job. "From my skillsets point of view, I was just purely doing predictive modeling. A lot of statistics. And I thought, even with such a big corporation, there's such a big disconnect between analytics and engineering—IT, basically. I wanted to expand my skillset to a full-blown data scientist." Though he considered expanding his skillsets via alternative occupations, the allure of the competitive gaming community, and its increasing mainstream presence, ultimately led to his decision to go indie for half a year.

"I'm in Silicon Valley, nerd central, and there's conversations in Starbucks where people talk about AP Corki or whatever. So I thought, 'okay, this is a big enough audience," Park remembers. "There's big enough interest in people just talking about builds. So I thought, 'let's do two birds; one stone.' Do something I love, and also expand my skillset."

The lack of a pre-existing service on League of Legends websites helped spur his efforts, but it did mean he had to basically create everything from scratch. "Everything was new to me," says Park. "I literally had to start with beginning tutorials for Javascript, MongoDB, all these foreign languages and programs I had no idea about."

To aid his solo effort, Park deliberately chose programs with a minimum amount of administration needed. But that still meant single-handedly handling the database, back-end, front-end, and even design. Six months later, a working prototype was borne.

Modeling behavior

"The Theorycraftr building system is an archive of all aspects of League of Legends contributing to calculating damage," Park wrote in an introductory post on Reddit. In short, it lets users compare champion stats, assign skills and attacks, mess around with item builds, and finally answer if G2 Kikis's legendary Twisted Fate jungle from last year was actually a good idea or not (at least on paper).

The project as-is basically allows anybody to simulate the outcomes of a battle without having to actually get into the game themselves, or worse—actually calculate each interaction by hand or elaborate spreadsheets. With access to Riot's API, it also allows players and analysts to do patch-vs-patch comparisons, to see who dropped off past usability with patch changes, or who's been buffed into relevance.

Currently, it only allows players to do theoretical matches, but Park wants to make it relevant past the hardcore stats-obsessed demographic, and to players in general. "I still have to research this and do vetting if this is feasible and maintainable, but what I want to do is set up the Theorycraftr engine and apply it to match history. So what I want to do is, if you have a match and you lost, you can go back in time to a major fight and you can switch out some of your items. It'll tell you how much your defense increased, how much your output would have increased, and everything would adjust accordingly."

He also hopes to have it apply to professional games as well, though that would first require access to the tournament server data—if not available, then at least the public server accounts of professional players. "My philosophy in all of this, which I think I accomplished, is that I wanted to democratize analytics. What I want to make Theorycraftr into is: I want regular players to feel as if they have a team of analysts around them. They actually have serious tools that are very accessible."

Performance limit

According to Park, Theorycraftr as-is is still short of his full vision. The match history implementation is expected to finish at around June—a full year's worth of effort. But along the way, he's attracted a lot of high profile attention. "I don't know if this is supposed to be out there, but I got private messages from Curse, Fnatic, bunch of other websites... the one super-weird one was Mark Cuban!"

While public reception of Theorycraftr has been positive, team analysts are a little more skeptical of its application. Former CBLoL analyst Renato "Shakarez" Perdig o notes that there are hard limits to what you can predict off damage calculations alone. "It's basically too theoretical and not practical at all," said Perdig o. "League isn't a 1v1 game, and the way it's calculated is always assuming perfect scenarios where you hit every skillshot—which frankly doesn't happen 99% of the time."

Factors like movespeed and map movement self-evidently can't be modeled by Theorycraftr, but Oceania's Mike "Cyranoss" Giglio is more balanced in his reception. "I thought it makes a really good baseline tool to teach someone a lane matchup," said Giglio. "You can pretty easily plug your opponent's usual build and see when you're stronger vs when you're weaker—and, as a result, how you should play different parts of the matchup. That sort of baseline can be really useful for a player just trying to pick up a champion."

He's more skeptical about Park's plans for match history analysis. "Due to the way teams have to play scrims, and there being a tournament realm, it's unlikely this system will be the one that finds a work-around no one else has." Pro teams have a habit of minimizing scouting potential by not playing scrims in full, preventing match history from recording the results of their game.

But even more than that, Giglio points out that scrim and solo queue behavior can often be at drastic odds with what shows up on stage—something that dynamic queue, which encourages teams to queue together, doesn't actually solve. "Even if the whole team groups together, most players are more paranoid than coaches about giving away information to other teams. So they play silly champions together, or all swap roles, or other nonsense. I've never worked with a team that played together normally on live servers unless they had to play ranked 5s to qualify for a tournament."

With that in mind, however, Giglio admits that there's a viable market below the LCS level. "If Riot is still doing ranked 5s to qualify for Challenger events, teams involved in those would definitely benefit the most."

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

For those of us not interested in ye olden sports and looking to skip the Super Bowl, there's a ton of competitive gaming to watch online this weekend. Let's start with an unusual team-based spin on Blizzard's wizard poker...

Hearthstone: Red Bull Team Brawl

2016 is truly the year of new formats for Hearthstone. Hot on the heels of Blizzard announcing Standard and Wild format will arrive this spring, Red Bull will be hosting what is probably the strangest tournament format yet. Teams of three will get 240 random cards (weighted by the rarity system) and then have 30 minutes to build three decks from their collective card pool using each card only once. If the format sounds confusing, there's this handy explanation video, or you can just watch live here starting Saturday at 12pm PST. It's a one-day event.

League of Legends: NA LCS and the LPL

League of Legends' Spring Split continues merrily on. The EU LCS is wrapping up today, but the North American LCS will be going from 12-5ish PST on both Saturday and Sunday. Additionally, you'll be able to catch the tail-end of the Chinese LPL Saturday night from 11pm-2am PST. You can also watch all the action on Riot Games' official Twitch channel right here.

StarCraft 2: 2016 WCS Winter Circuit NA and EU Qualifier Finals

The WCS Winter Circuit Qualifiers have been going since the middle of last week, and although we already saw half of the finals play out last weekend, this weekend we finish off the list. Three more pros from NA and four more from EU will move on from tomorrow's tournament, out of a field of 16 players across both regions. The action kicks off on Saturday at 9am PST with the EU Qualifiers, followed by the NA Qualifiers at 4pm PST. You can find the NA stream here and the EU stream here.

Counter-Strike: Assembly Winter 2016

Eight teams—including the Copenhagen Wolves, ENCE eSports, and more—battle over what is roughly a $16k prizepool and a whole lot of glory. The tournament actually began today at 2am PST, and while most of the games have already been played, the semis and the finals will take place late on Saturday night. The first semi will be between ENCE and the Wolves, while the second semi is between Team LDLC Blue and a currently unknown opponent—either Team LDLC White or Epiphany Bolt. The semifinals begin Saturday at 4am PST, with the finals scheduled for 12:30pm PST. You can watch it live here. 

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

It's week four of the competitive season, which marks, roughly, the group stage s mid point. The leaders and losers of each of the competitive circuits are now established in their respective roles—and there have definitely been some clear beneficiaries of the new season's changes. Undefeated streaks exist in four out of five of the premier circuits, with no sign as yet that their erstwhile local rivals can stop them anytime soon.

Yet beyond the superficial details—who's winning, who's undefeated, and so on—it's hard to form an accurate assessment of the teams. The lack of international contests doesn't help—there's no way to get a broader context of each team's relative merits without it, and the Mid-Season Invitational is months away (not to mention that nothing about its format or scheduling has been announced). Nonetheless, there's both an optimistic and pessimistic way to interpret even the most impressive current winstreaks based on the matchups they've played, the relative strength of their scene, and even the players they've fielded.

In North America

Take, for instance, the renewal of the Huni & Reignover Show, moved over to the North America channel of the LCS. The second season has a nice twist on the first: in order to preserve the drama, Huni & Reignover are now teamed with a full staff of roster rejects—players and personalities that didn't work out for whatever reason on other more established teams. It's the classic, all-American underdog story of the under-appreciated or unnoticed making it big against the odds!

Does that make the Immortals an international contender? Not so fast.

There's no doubt that the Immortals are North America's number one team. Their games are often a show of total dominance—a huge vindication for the likes of ex-CLG Pobelter, ex-TSM WildTurtle and ex-Impulse Adrian. WildTurtle, in particular, hasn't looked this good since the pentakill that started his TSM career. The fans he lost over the course of the last year, when his performance dwindled and TSM's hopes for a decent Worlds showing evaporated, have all come flooding back.

Does that make the Immortals an international contender? Not so fast. Their prestige is measured against a pretty poor run of contenders thus far, a consequence of the slate of visa problems afflicting the western scene. To their credit, their win against NRG was definitive—but it was also the only game that actually mattered. The less said about Renegades and Echo Fox, the kinder; C9 fielded the ironically unlucky Bunny FuFuu versus them instead of Hai; TSM is in its worst form since pretty much ever.

Sure, it's entertaining to see a competent team steamroll through the opposition. But IMT fans take care—when you look at the details and discern the meat and bones of IMT's success, it begs the question of how much of it is genuinely the outcome of genius and hard work, and how much of it is because they've been hand-fed weak opposition.

The obvious joke here is that "weak opposition" constitutes all of NA, but that isn't entirely fair. Not only do they get a rematch against NRG in a few weeks, but they still have yet to face CLG (something that Pobelter might be looking forward to, given that he lost a starting position with them to Huhi). Reignover's also yet to be tested by Liquid's Dardoch, one of the most impressive rookie LCS players of this split.

In Taiwan

Speaking of vindication: Chawy on AHQ is everything that Chawy fans wanted for him. A secure position on a good team, nobody's dragging him down and wasting his in-game efforts, an endless streak of victories... the fact that he has to share the mid lane spotlight with Westdoor was a bit unexpected, coming into the spring split, but it's worked out nicely. With Westdoor on blue side games only, the team ducks around the issues caused by his lackluster champion pool with first pick priority and flex pick options. With Chawy on red side, they can put anything into his hands and make it work.

And so far, that's exactly how it's gone. AHQ's undefeated in four out of four best-of-two sets. The closest they've gotten to a scare is having Chawy's Kassadin get camped—a bad time for him, maybe, but the pressure lifted from AN and Albis basically made it a bot lane game from that point on. And unlike the NA LCS, the LoL Master Series isn't lacking for contenders—Machi, Taipei Assassins, Hong Kong Esports and Flash Wolves have all been showing off some serious stunts in their most recent games.

But all of them lie deep under AHQ's great shadow. The LMS is currently a struggle for silver.

You'd think that would make me happy, that my personal favorite team is doing so well domestically. But the totality of their dominance is suspect for the same reasons as the Immortals: a total lack of struggle means that it's impossible to actually isolate the team's weaknesses. Confounding the issue: AHQ's mid laner setup is deliberately designed to further obfuscate weaknesses. But a lot of their pick-ban strategies, and the way that having two specialists interact with it, are dependent upon a deep understanding of how the enemy team will approach the options given. In other words: it's a setup that works great within the Taiwanese meta, but not necessarily elsewhere.

That makes for an extremely well-defined metagame without a whole lot of ambiguities or complexities to account for.

In prior international tournaments, the Taiwanese teams have been accused of having weak pick-ban strategies, often giving up power picks to teams they should have had a handle on. There's truth behind that—most teams were too poor to have the analysts to do deep research and optimize the overall pick-ban process (an artifact of Taiwan being the poorest of the premier regions by a long shot—most players can only wish for H2K's infamous "5.5 effing k"). The teams that could afford them only had to focus their efforts on each other—basically, only AHQ and TPA for the longest time, then adding Flash Wolves and HK Esports since last year.

That makes for an extremely well-defined metagame without a whole lot of ambiguities or complexities to account for. It also makes for a glaring weakness for our top teams. Without that in-depth familiarity with their opposition, even the most impressive Taiwanese teams often lose the very weapon that made them so dominant back home: the research and scouting done to peel apart their next match.

It might smack of paranoia for a team to be asking itself "are we having it too good" after dominating a circuit, but it's historically been a question well worth asking. Even Korea's not immune—the ROX Tigers were the clear victors of their spring split last year too, only to fall flat at Tallahassee, Florida. Winning everything, after all, comes at the cost of learning nothing. And especially in the case of North America and Taiwan, two regions that have historically struggled the most to have an international presence, stagnation is something they simply can't afford.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

The grip of winter can t save you from hot hot electric sport. There s major Dota 2 in China and minor CS:GO in Romania. In League of Legends the North American Championship Series thunders on leaving drama in its wake, and we round off with a bit of punching for good measure. Have a great weekend!

Dota 2: MarsTV League Winter 2015

That's right! 'Winter 2015'. Like the saying goes, it doesn't matter if you're not sure what year it is when you've got a great set of international Dota 2 teams competing for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's taking place in China, so eight hours ahead of GMT/seven ahead of CET/sixteen ahead of PST. If you tune in over the weekend you can catch the winner's bracket final and a bunch of lower bracket games on Saturday followed by the lower bracket final and grand final on Sunday. The grand final begins at 10:00 GMT/11:00 CET/02:00 PST, and you can find up to date schedule information on Gosugamers. You can also find the English language Azubu stream here.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: PGL European Minor Championship 2016

Eight European CS:GO squads fight for $50,000 in Bucharest. There's a mixture of established and aspiring talent in contention, so this comes recommended to talent scouts as well as fans of the European scene. The group A matches are taking place today, with group B to follow on Saturday followed by playoffs for the top four teams on Sunday. Play begins at 11:00 GMT/12:00 CET/03:00 PST and runs throughout the day. You can find the stream on Twitch.

League of Legends: North American Championship Series

The new season rolls on with a full weekend of play in North America. Expect a lot of action packed into a relatively short span of time, and after a dramatic first week there's a lot to live up to. In particular, look to TSM to want to improve their performance— they face Cloud9 on Saturday and NRG on Sunday. Check out this page on LoLesports for a full schedule and stream info and the main page for the other regional leagues—there are also games in the LCK and LMS over the weekend.

Killer Instinct: World Cup

Yes, yes, it isn't a PC game. If you don't like it, stop asking for fighting game coverage. Even then it won't matter, because fighting games are awesome. In any case: there's $30,000 on the line in San Antonio as the KI community dukes it out for the world title. Find tournament info here and the stream here. At the moment there isn't a schedule available, but expect games throughout the weekend on Pacific time.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

While the western scene scrambles to make up for a wave of controversial visa rejections, Asian hemisphere League of Legends is already operating at full throttle. Of course, some engines are better than others at handling that much torque. China's top teams of yesteryear, for instance, already seem like they're out of gas.

China

It's hard to cover China. Their broadcasts overlap with the other eastern hemisphere circuits, they have an absurd number of games to play through, and worst of all: there's no consistency to be found amid the chaos that is the LPL. The split-groups format also makes it difficult to gauge just how good Royal Club and Qiao Gu Reapers actually are—in the wake of LGD's collapse, the utter nightmare that is OMG's roster situation, and Edward Gaming's insistence that Fireloli is actually a pro-tier player, it could be that the rest of China just sucks too much to give them a real test of their capabilities.

Take note that these are also the teams that performed best all last season, and were even compared favorably to top Korean teams. Even I bought the hype, leading up to that fateful October—only to be disappointed massively when just one of them managed to make it to the quarterfinals (and was subsequently disgraced with a 0-3).

What does it take for a Worlds finalist region to degenerate so rapidly?

It's been a tough year for Chinese esports overall, actually. Europe's got their number in Dota 2, North America slapped them down in Smite (who saw Enemy taking second at Smite Worlds? Nobody? Nobody), and they have no presence in any other event. For whatever reason, the second-most prestigious region in esports is looking like a paper tiger this spring. Or, to switch metaphors, their lavish spending and obsession with imports is looking more like a cargo cult than a legitimate infrastructural investment.

What does it take for a Worlds finalist region to degenerate so rapidly? Money isn't necessarily the root of the problem—but the problem is that China has proven that spending doesn t necessarily lead to success. By treating talent as a discrete commodity to purchase, a fundamental point has been missed, I think, in regards to the care and nurturing needed to make it thrive—and questionable staffing decisions (like, to beat a dead equine, freaking Fireloli being anywhere near the stage) suggests that Chinese managers and coaches haven't yet gotten the point.

League of Legends is not a game where you can just hire DanDy and Mata and expect them to bail you out.

Taiwan

It is, however, totally the sort of game where smart substitution strategies can wreak utter havoc through the standings. I admit skepticism when Westdoor announced that he wasn't retiring—though I'll defend his legacy at the drop of the hat, it's been obvious for a long time that he's too narrowly focused as a player to avoid getting banned and focused out of games.

The good news is that AHQ was well aware of that too, and planned accordingly. Chawy, formerly of the Taipei Assassins (and before then, fellow GPL 2012 rivals Singapore Sentinels) is unbannable. He especially likes playing an unorthodox pool of control mages—his mid lane Zilean, repeated only once so far by any other region, had terrorized Taiwanese solo queue to the point that it's an auto-ban. The one time it leaked through, its area control utterly shut down any attempts to stall out or even fight against AHQ's tower-pushing. His only problem is that control mages rarely single-handledly shut out a game like Westdoor's assassins.

Taiwan's inability to pay for stellar talent works in its favor

That means Chawy can play all the red side games, and Westdoor plays all the blue siders. Between the preferential bans, the first-pick flex options, and the fact that both Ziv and Albis have been outright carries as well, Westdoor's champion pool weaknesses are neatly covered. As of yet, not a single LMS team has figured out how to break through AHQ's strategic shield—they've come close a couple times by throwing everything they've got at disrupting mid lane, but AHQ's integrative strengths both in and outside of the game itself has proven a daunting challenge.

If there's any region that can (eventually) produce the necessary teamwork to overcome that challenge, it might actually be the LMS. Regardless of whether or not they're still Worlds-quality, their talent-fostering has been producing serious fruit. They've reformed old bad players (REFRA1N is actually amazing now, but I remember him mostly being Karsa's lackluster predecessor), and their newer players like FW top laner Rins and Machi mid laner Apex have proven not only mechanically adept, but adept at teamplay as well.

If anything, it's almost as if Taiwan's inability to pay for stellar talent works in its favor. Trainee advancement through its farm teams to LMS level is actually common enough to be expected now—only Hong Kong Esports, privately funded by CEO Derek Cheung, is doing anything like the mainland circuit's talent acquisitions. Gash Bears, Gamania's attempt to re-enter the League of Legends scene, famously bought out a star roster, including Japan's Rokenia (who, in actuality, is a South Korean native).

Gash Bears were made a throw rug by YoLMS, a team consisting of a former Taipei Snipers vet and four untested rookies. YoLMS rebranded as HeatWave, got themselves sponsored by XGamers, and took a game off Worlds quarterfinalist Flash Wolves to make themselves the most successful rookie team since the start of the LMS.

Of course, they need to prove they can stick it out. The last successful rookie team got half their roster banned by stupid contract breaches: alas for Midnight Sun.

South Korea

If you want to see beautiful League of Legends played, it's not Taiwan or China you're looking at. It's still, and might always be, South Korea. The most recent game between ROX Tigers and SKT T1 was yet another apt demonstration why it was these two teams that deserved their respective finalist finishes at Worlds last season—a dance of strategy and guile that has not yet found a rival or equal anywhere else in the world.

Maybe that sounds like excess praise. And it certainly isn't as if they're immune to mistakes. SKT T1 alternate jungler Blank's single-man dive on Smeb raises all sorts of questions (he went in even after top laner Duke was sent flying a full screen away). But Korea didn't just survive China's poaching—they shrugged it off, won their third Worlds title in a row, and came into the spring split looking entirely unfazed.

"We can make another Pawn. We can maybe even make another Faker, if we had to."

Okay, fair. Afreeca Freecs and SBENU Sonicboom are pretty awful—their players have mechanical capabilities, but they play with all the coordination of a drunk duck. Longzhu IM isn't quite as good as people expected them to be, given the stacked deck they managed to build at the start of the split. But the fact remains that the Korean scene's only gone from strength to strength. Given the last couple years, they've retained the impression that there's going to be yet another superstar rookie just around the corner, or hidden in a lower-tier roster, just waiting to be recognized and picked up.

That sort of depth implies all sorts of things about their esports culture—the skill of its talent scouts, the dedication of its practitioners, and, ultimately, the expendability of even its best aces. Counter-intuitively, that last one is a good thing. Korea's high export rate of esports pros may have made the other circuits more exciting, particularly the NA LCS, but it's also a show of power. "We can make another DanDy at any time," it suggests. "We can make another Pawn. We can maybe even make another Faker, if we had to."

If they day ever comes when South Korea loses its vise-grip on the crown, it'll be when another region can finally say "we can too."

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Buckle up, friends, for another packed weekend of pro gaming. There's high-level play happening across the biggest competitive games on PC. League of Legends continues its Spring season, CS:GO has a massive DreamHack tournament to enjoy, the excellent Hearthstone Starladder StarSeries finally comes to a conclusion, and Dota 2 has something a little more leftfield to check out.

Dota 2: Captain's Draft 3.0

The Captain's Draft 3.0 tournament just kicked off and sports a hefty prizepool of $100k, which can be expanded further through community contributions. Captain's Draft 3.0 is named as such because it uses the slightly different Captain's Draft game mode for the entire tournament. Qualifiers began on the 19th and will continue all weekend. You can find a schedule and results of the matches here, and the stream here.

Hearthstone: StarLadder i-League StarSeries Finals

The Hearthstone StarSeries is finally reaching its LAN climax this weekend. Games have already gotten underway today, but the winner will be crowned on Saturday, walking away with a sizeable chuck of a $50k prizepool. There's a lot of Hearthstone going on this weekend, but this is the most reliable source of high-quality casting and play. You can check the schedule here, albeit in Russian, and find the english version of the stream here.

League of Legends: NA LCS, LPL, LMS, and LCK

LoL's spring season started back up last week, and will continue to be a great watch overthe next few months. North America, China, and Taiwan continue their regular competition as the NA LCS, LPL, and LMS respectively, and we can also add Korea's LCK to this week's list. You can find schedules for the games at the links above, while the big, friendly 'watch live' button on the lolesports.com homepage will take you straight to the stream. 

CS:GO: DreamHack Leipzig 2016

As with Hearthstone, there's a whole bunch of CS:GO being played this weekend, but the biggest tournament by far is DreamHack Leipzig. Na'Vi, Virtus.pro, Dignitas and more will square off at the German LAN event, with the winners taking home $50k for themselves. Games began today and the full schedule is right here. You can also find the stream here.

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