Esports organization OTK brought a whole new meaning to the “day of the dead” on Halloween by hosting one of the most terrifying, anxiety-inducing World of Warcraft Classic dueling tournaments you’ll ever watch.
OTK has hosted numerous Classic tournaments in the past, but with Blizzard’s addition of Hardcore servers, the group created its first-ever to-the-death dueling tournament. That’s right, the single elimination tournament consisted exclusively of Mak’Gora battles to the death with a $100,000 prize pool on the line, $50,000 of which went to the winner.
Players had to qualify for the 64-player bracket, but by the end of the nearly eight-hour just one player stood alive amid a graveyard of more than 60 corpses as the victor, and if you follow WoW PvP esports, you won’t be surprised to know it was the one true Warlock, Snutzy.
The extremely unique event captivated the masses on Tuesday, with more than 100,000 viewers watching a co-stream of the tournament on Asmongold’s alternate Twitch channel.
The main broadcast on Esfand’s main Twitch channel steadily kept 20,000+ viewers and many of the tournament’s competitors shared their perspectives to the tune of a few thousand viewers each themselves.
Along with the veteran expertise of Snutzy ruling the day, a swathe of household names in the World of Warcraft PvP community. The final four of the event was a star-studded cast of players representing a diverse group of classes with Ziqo on Mage, Snutzy playing Warlock, Sonii as Warrior, and the popular Classic Priest player Hydra making it.
Because Classic duels can oftentimes come down to class matchups, OTK used half of its massive prize pool to reward the player from each class to make it the furthest. Each of the final four competitors came away with at least $6,250. Meanwhile, the hunter, druid, and shaman that made it to the semi-finals also won some cash. Unfortunately for Rogue mains, no Rogue made it past the second round, leading to a four-way tie for the top Rogue spot.
It’s unclear when OTK might plan on doing an event like this again, but based on how many characters they just killed off, it might take a while for anyone to be ready for another matchup against the absolute unit that is Snutzy.
Whenever that happens though, we’ll be very ready.
