Professional Hearthstone competition

Blizzard Entertainment's online collectable card game Hearthstone became played professionally quickly after its release in March 2014. The game is played as an eSport, with high-level tournaments such as Blizzard's official World Championships featuring prize money of up to a million US dollars, and livestreamers make a living of playing the game on Twitch.tv.

The first Hearthstone tournament was held at Blizzcon on 2013-11-8, only a few months after the release of the game's closed beta and several months before the official release of the game on 2014-03-11. Blizzard selected eight prominent Hearthstone players to compete at what they titled the "Hearthstone Innkeeper's Invitational". The tournament was won by Artosis, who was subsequently crowned the "Grandmaster of the Hearth". After the official release of the game, more Hearthstone tournaments followed, including events at EGX Rezzed and DreamHack Bucharest. Blizzcon 2014 featured a Hearthstone tournament with a $250,000 USD prize pool, the largest up to that point, and players from the Americas, Europe, and Asia qualified for the event through winning regional tournaments.

In June 2014, the organization of Assembly Summer 2014, a Finish qualifying tournament for the International e-Sports Federation's (IeSF) World Championship, sparked controversy when it was announced that tournament would be open for men only. The cause was that the World Championship was also slated to have an all-male line-up, and its qualifying events were subject to the same rules. According to the IeSF, rule was set in place in order to "secure traditional sports status" for esports. The forced gender division was abolished a few days after it was announced for Assembly Summer when the IeSF switched to an "open for all" format.

...
Wikipedia