This Week in eSports 10/21 - 10/27

Competitions

• [NA] The North American Challenger League (otherwise known as Salty league) continues for week 4 of their 8 week challenger season with a $35,000 prize pool. A list of participating teams can be found on the Leaguepedia page. Be sure to check out/follow the stream Monday-Thursday for matches!

•  [NA/EU] The Season 4 Promotion Qualifier is underway for both NA and EU LCS. 16 North American teams will be competing for two Season 4 NA LCS Promotion seeds. More information for NA can be found on Leaguepedia. 8 EUW Teams and 8 EUNE teams will be competing for two Season 4 EU LCS Promotion seeds. More information for EU can be found via the Leaguepedia page. Be sure to check out Riot's announcement, NA preview, and EU preview.  

• [EU] The International Invitational Tournament 2, consisting of four Turkish teams and twelve invited European teams, concluded today. In first place is one of the current EU LCS Promotion qualified challenger team Copenhagen Wolves, followed by Team Dignitas UK, and TCM-Gaming (who are also qualified for EU LCS Promotion). For VODs and other information, check out the Leaguepedia page! 

• [KR]  OGN Winter will begin on November 15th with the conclusion of group stages this week. Stream link can be found here. In related news, Cloudtemplar (who recently retired) will become one of the casters for OGN! Announcement can be found here.

Teams in the Round of 16,  via Leaguepedia

• [All] After a brief hiatus from League of Legends, WCG 2013 qualifiers have officially started! However, you won't see any EU or NA LCS teams competing due to restrictions imposed by Riot. More information and stream links can be found on the Leaguepedia page! There's a HUGE amount of teams participating - and qualifiers are occurring nightly so be sure to check them out! 

Team News & Roster Changes

• [NA] CLG began unveiling their Season 4 plans by moving bigfatlp to a sub position and Chauster announced his retirement from competitive play. The full announcement can be found over on CLG's site. For those that are interested, Chauster did an AMA on Reddit which can be found here.

• [NA] TSM announced that they will have one sub for every role in Season 4, and released Dan Dinh and Wingsofdeathx from their roster. Ninjaken joined as one of the first substitutes.

• [EU] It was announced that Freeze will be playing with Ninjas in Pyjamas in Season 4. MrRallez is a sub for NiP. Full announcement can be found via twitter.

• [SEA] Gamania Bears, the team which disbanded recently due to age restrictions, has partially reformed under the name yoe Flash Wolves. Their new roster includes Steak, Maooo, Maple, Dee, and SwordArt. NL and HueiYun also joined leaving Maooo and Dee to fulfill the sub position for Jungler and AD Carry respectively. You can see them compete in the WCG tournament soon as they won the Taiwan qualifiers. More information can be found via Leaguepedia and Alex Penn's blog post (It's a very good read! Check it out!).

Misc.

• [All] HBO Sports produced a segment on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel about League of Legends and eSports in general. Just in case you missed it check out on HBOGO! (Try checking the reddit thread too)