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The 2009 edition of World Esports Masters is due to kick off in just hours, what can we expect of this tournament?

It is Saturday the 12th of December which will be the official kick-off date for World Esports Masters 2009. The eight teams attending the tournament arrived a few days ago and have the past few days been killing time in the hotel. Yesterday featured the official press-conference, where the government welcomed teams, players and press to the city of Hangzhou.

Nine o'clock this morning the teams headed out to the venue, to do the opening ceremony rehearsals. The opening ceremony for World Esports Masters 2009 will begin at 13:00 local time (06:00CET), Counter-Strike 1.6 action will begin at 18:30 local (11:30CET).

The event sees a total of three stand-ins, Björn "threat" Pers for fnatic, Jaroslaw "pasha" Jarzabkowski for AGAiN and Juuso "contE" Sajakoski for Power Gaming. As we saw at DreamHack Winter and Arbalet Cup Europe, mTw clearly managed to do well with a stand-in, so the tournament might not lose quality, even with three teams using stand-ins.

The opening day of World Esports Masters 2009 will feature three matches, followed by 2-3 matches the coming days. It will be a non-stress event for the teams, who really have a lot of free-time in between matches.

It will be two interesting groups, where just two teams advances to the playoffs, being played in a best-of-three map single elimination bracket. All matches will as we proudly announced earlier, be available to follow via HLTV.

I encourage you to stay locked to HLTV.org during the entire event, as we will bring you all of the action from World Esports Masters.