With less than 2 days until World eSports Championship kicks off in Hangzhou, the schedule has been released. After scrapping the qualifiers and replacing them with direct invites, the WEC will welcome Evil Geniuses, Cloud 9 as well as the new squad of Natus Vincere. Vankskor, fng, Rabbit and Fata will all be gracing the stage with their new teams, but who will shine?

Image courtesy of Natus Vincere.

Unfortunately, the Western Qualifier was cancelled due to a problematic overlap with i-League which caused trouble for participants of both events. Further complications arose when

Team Secret were forced to withdraw after some of their players got their visas denied just a few days ago.

Participating teams

Newbee

HyperGloryTeam

LGD Gaming

LGD.CDEC

Vici Gaming

Evil Geniuses

Cloud 9

Natus Vincere

This tournament will be the first real challenge for the renewed line-ups with the first place at the World eSports Championship granting the victorious team a paycheck for almost $100,000. The current International Champion

Newbee filled an empty slot after the retirement of Zhang "xiao8" Ning, and replaced him with Wang "Rabbit" Zhang. Rabbit was transferred to Newbee for approximately $130,000 by

LGD Gaming.

In the Western part of the world,

Natus Vincere also went through some changes recently picking up Ivan "VANSKOR" Skorokhod and Artsiom "fng" Barshack from

Team Empire and

Power Rangers. Meanwhile after Team EG did so well without him at TI4, Clinton "Fear" Loomis has a chance to once again display his LAN experience, coming back into the team after a long break.

JoinDOTA will be providing English commentary for all these games on our channels Red and Blue.

Schedule

All times are in CEST.

5 September