After the World of Warcraft community blew up thanks to a well-organized player dueling tournament in the WoW Classic Beta, hundreds of thousands tuned in to see the head-to-head action live on Twitch.

Hours of intense WoW Classic dueling later (six and a half hours to be exact) culminated in a Grand Finals battle between a former World of Warcraft Champion against a current World of Warcraft Champion. It was Elliott “Venruki” Venczel of team Method against Cloud9’s Kelvin “Snutz” Nguyen in the finals. 

Though Snutz managed to steal a win in their best-of-five series, it was Venruki taking the whole series with a 3-1 victory in the end. Some close dueling went down in the Barrons and Glades today. 

With the win, Venruki proves that old hats rule old World of Warcraft and he also snatched up the $2,000 USD prize. 

The WoW Classic Cup was a Horde-only dueling tournament -- because that’s the popular faction among World of Warcraft players -- but that didn’t stop the Alliance players from showing up and (being polite for the most part) spectating the event. 

Eventually though, as the Horde do, the entire group decided to turn on the spectating Alliance, and a small war broke out. Here is that engagement (short) from Twitch streamer Sodapoppin’s point-of-view. 

At its peak, the WoW Classic Cup reached more than 200,000 viewers on Twitch across more than a dozen pro players’ streams and TipsOut’s (who was refereeing the tournament) channel. 

If nothing, the WoW Classic Cup proves that there is at least a small portion of the World of Warcraft community that desperately want a WoW Classic competitive scene. The turnout of spectators, the high-tier performances by pro players, and the adoration of the fans all go to support the idea that Blizzard may benefit from putting some time into the title after it launches.