Esports | StarCraft II | Serral — The Seven-Game World Final at Spodek

On 27 February 2022, Finland’s Joona “Serral” Sotala and Italy’s Riccardo “Reynor” Romiti took their places on the StarCraft II stage inside Spodek Arena in Katowice for the grand final of Intel Extreme Masters Katowice 2022, the concluding tournament of the 2021–22 ESL Pro Tour.

ESL organized the Blizzard-supported competition using StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void on patch 5.0.8, with the final played offline as a one-versus-one best-of-seven series.

Each game awarded one point toward the match score, and the first player to reach four game wins became the tournament champion.

Both finalists selected Zerg, one of StarCraft II’s three playable factions, making the series a mirror matchup rather than a contest shaped by different faction toolkits.

Serral won the first two games, but defending Katowice champion Reynor answered with three consecutive wins, turning a 0–2 deficit into a 3–2 lead and moving within one game of retaining the title.

Serral won Game Six to force the deciding seventh game, where the competitors developed near-symmetrical early positions before Serral’s later attack arrived ahead of Reynor’s completed Lurker force.

Reynor conceded that final game, giving Serral the 4–3 series victory after all seven available games had been required.

The win gave Serral his first IEM Katowice championship and the StarCraft II world title attached to that ESL Pro Tour season, adding Katowice to the World Championship Series Global Finals title he had won in 2018.

The arena was part of the result’s context: ESL reported that the 2022 Katowice event was its first competition in 812 days to admit an onsite audience, and both the StarCraft II and CS:GO grand finals occupied Spodek on the final day.

Visitors can still identify the event site at Aleja Wojciecha Korfantego 35 by the main hall’s broad, saucer-like roof; the cover photograph shows that exterior at night in 2006, not the 2022 match itself.

Primary sources: https://eslfaceitgroup.com/press/serral-and-faze-clan-secure-intel-extreme-masters-katowice-2022-champion-titles/ ; https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/23230082/the-exciting-future-of-starcraft-ii-esports

Independent sources: https://esports.gg/news/esports/serral-defeats-reynor-to-become-iem-world-champion/ ; https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/IEM_Katowice/2022

Photo: Lestat (Jan Mehlich), CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Katowice_-_Spodek_by_night.jpg