$250,000 on the line for the Hearthstone World Championship

The prize purse for the Hearthstone crown event at Blizzcon will feature a six-digit prize pool, Blizzard's latest blogpost reads. $100,000 will be handed out to the winner while the remaining fifteen other participants will split the monstrous $150,000.
We all knew that the Hearthstone event at BlizzCon would be big but few probably expected to be on this scale. According to Blizzard, the closing event of 2014 for the digital card game will feature a whopping $250,000 prize pool, a purse equal to that of StarCraft's WCS.
This is comes as the biggest news for all Hearthstone fans and players. Scheduled during the days of BlizzCon 2014, the crown event of Hearthstone - a game less than a year old - will bring together 16 of the best players from all over the world, fighting for a cheque that'll be hard, if not impossible, to beat by other tournament organizers.
$100,000 will be taken home by the champion of BlizzCon with the runner-up taking home half of that amount. The other two players in the top four will bank $15,000 each, leaving $80,000 to be split between the other 12 players.
Blizzard also revealed the format for the NA and EU qualifiers. Each of these will feature 130 players, a mix of weekly and major tournament winners as well as the top 16 from the April-August seasons. Those 130 will be thrown in a swiss melee which is to cut the competition down to 16 players.
Round 2 is a standard double-elimination group stage, featuring four groups of four players with top 2 advancing further. The closing stage will be a simple 8-man single elimination bracket, qualifying the top 4 for the BlizzCon finals. There is no information whether the qualifiers will feature a separate prize pool. Further details should also be revealed soon about the Chinese and Korea/Taiwan qualifiers.
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