StarCraft II StarLeague

StarCraft II StarLeague (SSL)

Logo for 2015 season.
Sport	StarCraft II
Founded	December 2014
Country	South Korea
Continent	Asia
Most recent champion(s)	Kang "Solar" Min Soo
Official website	SPOTV GAMES Official Page (Korean)

The StarCraft II StarLeague, also known as SSL or S2SL in short, is a large StarCraft II tournament hosted by SPOTV GAMES that is played offline in South Korea. This tournament is held in parallel with the Global StarCraft II League (GSL) as qualifiers for the StarCraft World Championship Series (WCS) held yearly at BlizzCon.

Prior to the 2015 season, the StarCraft World Championship Series only had one StarCraft II individual league in South Korea, the GSL. On October 31, 2014 Blizzard Entertainment announced changes to the WCS system and that SPOTV GAMES would be holding a second individual league that would reward players with WCS points. It was announced on January 15, 2015 that Naver, Korea's largest search engine, would sponsor the first SSL tournament. The following two tournaments in the year were sponsored by SBENU, a casual footwear company.

The SSL is normally made up of two events, the Main Event, renamed in 2017 to Premier, and Challenge. The latter serves as a de facto qualifier for the former. Throughout its three year history, the SSL has gone through multiple large format changes of both leagues.

In all three seasons of 2015, the 16 players in the Main Event start off divided into four groups of four. Matches are best of three in the group stage and the top two players from each group move onto the playoffs round whereas the bottom two players in each group fall down to Challenge League for the following season. Players that advance to the playoffs stay in the main event the following season. Matches in the quarterfinals are best of five and the semifinals and finals are best of seven.

SSL Challenge is an event serving as a de facto qualifier for the main event. Players that qualify for the league and players that were eliminated early from the main event face off in a best of five match. The winners of each match move on to the main event and the losers fall out of the league and have to participate in the general qualifiers again.