The review of WeSave! Charity Play

About the tournament

WeSave! Charity Play was hosted on March 20-26. The overall prize pool of the tournament amounted $188,879. The initial sum was $120,000 and the rest of the money was collected in a crowdfunding way. The remarkable thing is that all money was not up for grabs for participants of the championship but were sent to the fund, which fights coronavirus. Besides, WePlay! would have asked bookmaker companies to refuse from taking bets if they had not been going to send the earned money to the fund, which fights coronavirus. Despite this, many bookmaker companies took bets on matches of WeSave! Charity Play after all.

Fund-raising

The organizers made various rewards to motivate viewers to contribute well. For example, the European and CIS regions were united in one division for passing the threshold of $150,000 where the best teams from CIS and Europe were playing in the final. For $160,000, WePlay! organized a showmatch with esports stars from North America and after the sum reached $180,000, the final matches were transformed into a bo5 format.

The results of the past matches

The absence of rewards for a victory at the championship made its impact on the performance of the teams and we saw, after all, no what we had expected initially. If you had expected to watch how Team Secret and Virtus.pro had destroyed everyone on their way in the European and CIS divisions, you would have been very disappointed. In the case of VP, you could expect to see a good fight with HellRaisers where “the Bears” won one map but the first match of Team Secret was over with big bad luck. Clement ‘Puppey’ Ivanov’s team did not prevail on a single map. Fans of NAVI were unsatisfied too. Despite they achieved victory over B8 Esports in the first match but they were not able to win a map in the match with HR, having lost the match with a score of 0-3. However, the participants from EU & CIS managed to bring us a beautiful and spectacular series of five maps in the grand final. HellRaisers were close to a victory but Team Nigma were stronger than their opponents.

We were able to watch the same situation in the Chinese division. Vici Gaming who had been showing good results at last championships suddenly did not win a map in the final against PSG.LGD, the team, which had not been able to make it to a Major in the season.

The most unpredictable division where fans of bets had an opportunity to make money was the North American region. There, Evil Geniuses defeated business associates with a score of 2-1 and achieved victory over CR4ZY with a result of 3-1. Besides, North America stood out with the fact that this region was the only one where a showmatch with an unusual format was hosted. There, the players from business associates and Cloud9: Fear, Brax, Moo, and Sneyking, MISERY, pieliedie, respectively, faced in a 3x3 match. They were playing in the All Random Deathmatch mode and the representatives of business associates were the winners.

Everything was less unpredictable in South America. The winners of recently-finished No Major No Problem in the face of Thunder Predator did not lose a map, having beaten beastcoast and NoPing e-sports on their way. The final match was especially interesting because it was commented by two champions of The International 2018 and The International 2019, n0tail and Ceb.

Team Adroit probably had the most difficult way to a victory in the Southeast Asian region. Initially, they had to beat the champion of the first Major of the current season, TNC Predator, and then they defeated Geek Fam in a tough battle. The pleasurable news for the support from Team Adroit is that he has received the title of the most valuable player of the tournament. The organizers used a reasonable approach while choosing the MVP, which was reflected in the favor of support players. Due to this, they announced Bok to be the most valuable player of the championship who had healed 91,124 health points of his teammates.

How interesting was this tournament for the public?

After the end of the championship, the organizers shared the success of broadcasts. 161,215 viewers gathered to watch the peak match, namely, the match between Team Secret and Team Nigma, 100,194 of viewers were on the streaming platform TwitchTV. The ratio of the English-speaking audience to the Russian-speaking audience was almost equal. English-speaking broadcasts attracted 59,157 viewers, while the Russian-speaking ones had up to 60,421 viewers.