IEM Season IX Taipei 2015: Format, Live Stream, More for StarCraft II Event

Beginning on Wednesday, Jan. 28, the Intel Extreme Masters Season IX Taipei StarCraft II gaming tournament will commence. At the Taipei World Trade Center during Taipei Game Show, 28 players will battle it out in hopes of reaching the Grand Finals on Super Bowl Sunday.

A total of $25,000 in prizes is available and up for grabs. Also 4,000 World Championship Series points are on the line. Here's how the prize money will be distributed.

Place	$ USD	WCS Points
1st	$10,000	+750
2nd	$4,000	+500
3rd-4th	$2,000	+375

While play begins with 28 players, only eight can participate in the Grand Finals on Sunday. Here's how the field will be broken down and the finalists will be determined:

During Stage 1, there will be two double-elimination brackets with eight players each. The top two finishers from both brackets advance to the next stage.

In Stage 2, four more groups take center stage. The groups consist of four players who played in the dual-tournament format. There will be four winners from Stage 1, eight qualifiers from Europe, Africa, the United States, Taiwan and Asia, as well as four players who received a special invite based on their overall results in the tournament.

The best two performers will advance to Stage 3. The quarterfinals and semifinals will be settled in a best-out-of-five series. The Grand Finals is a best-of-seven series. The battle between the best Protoss, Terran and Zerg players in the world should get pretty intense.

You can watch the action via live stream here. 

The Lone Terran and the HerO

One look at the breakdown of players set to compete in Taipei and it's clear that Zerg is the most popular species amongst elite players, per Team Liquid. In contrast, 20-year-old Jung "jjakji" Ji Hoon is the only Terran player. The member of Myinsanity hopes to represent the Terran species well in Taipei.

Thought the odds are clearly not in Hoon's favor, the South Korean could be poised for a breakout performance. He finished fourth and second at DreamHack Winter and DreamHack Moscow, respectively.

If he can perform, jjakji could grab his first win in a premier tournament since 2011 when he won the Global StarCraft II League in Nov. With the likes of his countrymen and current No. 1 StarCraft II player, Song "HerO" Hyeon Deok in action, it won't be easy.

Hero won IEM Season VIII in Cologne in Feb. 2014. Could we be set up for an epic head-to-head battle between jjakji and HerO? We hope so, but we will have to wait until Sunday to know for sure.

Follow Brian Mazique aka FranchisePlay, the Sports Video Game Journalist