Red Bull Media House announced yestesrday the 2014 Red Bull Battle Grounds tournament schedule! Making its way through three cities this year, the popular StarCraft II eSports tournament has some excitement in store.

StarCraft II's 2013 eSports season ended with a bang at BlizzCon, as the Protoss player sOs took a stunning victory. The event was one of the best in StarCraft II history, with over 120,000 viewers tuning in for the final match. Blizzard aims to address many of the problems that the community and professional players had with the WCS eSports format in the upcoming WCS 2014. StarCraft II is arguably the eSport with the highest skill cap, and provides a top tier experience for the viewer. Despite these facts, viewership is down slightly over previous SCII seasons. With the 2014 WCS season, Blizzard aims to put StarCraft II back on the eSports throne.

The 2013 WCS season was very convoluted: tournaments had overlapping schedules, there were periods of very little scheduled professional play and long running tournaments were quite condensed. WCS 2014 aims to fix this by instituting a linear schedule that is more consistent and to ensure more regular broadcasts, as well as making more time for dedicated third-party tournaments. Blizzard also promises more third-party partner tournaments that give dedicated WCS points.

The WCS World Finals of StarCraft II kicked off on Friday, November 8. After three seasons of regional qualifiers and world championships, the top 16 players of the year will face off in what is possibly the hardest StarCraft II tournament of all time. The finals are at BlizzCon, Blizzard Entertainment's massive annual convention. The winner will take home a grand prize of $100,000 and a huge trophy.

Blizzard Entertainment's strategy franchise StarCraft was the first video game series to support eSports. The trend continues this weekend in the World Championship Series Season 3 Finals of StarCraft II. In Toronto, Canada, 16 of the top players from the third and final season will compete for a $40,000 grand prize.