BlizzCon World Championship opening weekend times announced

The first stage of the World Championship Tournaments for World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2 and Hearthstone kicked off this weekend, with tourneys occurring over the next couple of days that will determine who goes through to the finals next weekend at BlizzCon. The World of Warcraft event took place last night—you can watch archived footage of that here—while the StarCraft 2 event and the Hearthstone one are set to get started later today and tomorrow/Monday respectively.

The whole thing's being streamed from ESL Studios in Burbank, while next weekend's final coincides with the festivities of BlizzCon at the Anahein Convention Center in California. To give you a sense of the scale of the thing, Metallica are there. (Playing songs, not competing in Hearthstone.)

You can watch the streams for the StarCraft 2 and Hearthstone tournaments right here if you fancy. I'll embed them below, ready for when they go live. Speaking of which, the StarCraft 2 tournament begins at 10am Pacific Time today (that's 5pm GMT), while the Hearthstone tourney kicks off at the same time tomorrow and on Monday. They'll run each day until 10pm Pacific Time (5am GMT), so I hope you don't have work in the morning.

Here's the StarCraft 2 stream:

And here's the Hearthstone stream:

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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.