With anticipation building for Turner Sports’ first venture into fighting games with the ELEAGUE Street Fighter Invitational, we now know the names of the players who will be competing for the title.
John Diamonon, Capcom’s director of licensing, revealed the full list of invitees to the ELEAGUE Street Fighter V Invitational on Saturday. The 32 players on the list will compete for a share of a $250,000 prize pool beginning in late March.
The 32-player field will include the biggest players in the game, with Lee “Infiltration” Seonwoo, Taniguchi “Tokido” Hajime, Justin Wong, and Darryl “Snake Eyez” Lewis among the invites.
There will be no shortage of talent on display. The list includes every Street Fighter Evo champion since 2009, as well as seven of the nine players who won Premier events on last season’s Capcom Pro Tour and 21 of the 32 players who qualified for last year’s Capcom Cup.
The top half of the list was determined by last year’s Capcom Pro Tour standings. The top 12 players in the global standings received invites, as did the top player in each of the four regions outside of the global top 12.
The bottom half of the list—selected by Capcom—contains an interesting mix of players, including Capcom Cup runner-up Ricki Ortiz, Evo darling Joe “LI Joe” Ciaramelli Iand rising star Victor “Punk” Woodley.
The players have had a wide range of success on the Pro Tour. Five of these ‘special’ invitees qualified for the 2016 Capcom Cup, and two others—Snake Eyez and Eduardo “PR Balrog” Perez—qualified for previous iterations.
The tournament gets underway on March 27, with the final scheduled for May 26.
