MLG Dallas's National Championship Sunday has begun at Major League Gaming's 2010 tournament!

Click here for the Halo 3 stream.

Click here for the StarCraft 2 stream.

The early matches of the tournaments began late Friday evening and kept rolling along Saturday. There were definitely some major upsets in the StarCraft 2 scene, but zerglings weren't the only thing to keep me occupied at MLG Dallas. There was also a huge Halo 3 tournament going on, and the brackets there were absolutely intense. Things will keep rolling along today, but here's my wrap up of the hottest Halo 3 and StarCraft 2 happenings from Saturday of at MLG Dallas.



HALO 3

There were several notable things that happened in the Halo 3 tournament Saturday. First and foremost, Instinct and Final Boss both made it to finals. Congrats to them! Instinct pulled off an extremely narrow win against Triggers Down in the Winners Bracket semifinals. When the matches between them were tied 2-2, in a best out of five tournament format,
Instinct won a Team Slayer Amplified 50-47 to take the set. The power of Roy and Cloud combined was no match for Triggers Down.

And then came the Final Boss matches. Final Boss was playing Status Quo in the semifinals and were down for most of the first match but managed to eek out ahead in the end for a 1-0 lead. In their next match, Slayer Pit, the teams were tied at 47 for a good while. With only twenty seconds left, Final Boss took the lead 48-47 which caused Status Quo to come out of hiding for an all out assault. A well shot rocket miraculously landed Status Quo a 50-49 win to tie the match at 1-1.

The final match of the set allowed the true colors of Final Boss to shine through. In a King of the Hill showdown, the score ended up a massive 237-212 due to a sick triple kill from FearItSelf. The win secured Final Boss a spot in the finals against Instinct which will take place today.

STARCRAFT 2

In the third appearance of StarCraft 2 at an MLG tournament, the amount of upsets and amazing games is fierce. Some of the fan favorites fell to the losers bracket and even out of the whole tournament earlier than anyone expected.  And in some of the longest games of the evening, Lazarus' Gaming PainUser surprised everyone by stomping all of his opponents, including the legendary LiquidTyler, a.k.a. NonY, a StarCraft Brood War legend, in one of
the final matches of the evening.

In the game between TeamLiquid's Nazgul and Team Evil Geniuses IdrA, the eventual outcome was surprising, but well deserved. TeamLiquid actually spent two weeks coming up with a strategy specifically designed to defeat IdrA in the tournament.  Nazgul, TeamLiquid's player manager and one of their weakest players, pulled of the strat brilliantly and managed to send IdrA packing into the losers bracket very early on.

And then, in what came as probably the largest upset of the day, IdrA was defeated by Dignitas' SeleCT in a fairly anticlimatic fashion. When the match was tied at 1-1 in a best of three format, SeleCT used a cheese proxy strat, and with the pressure of two barracks beating at IdrA's front door, IdrA said "GG", the official "I surrender" of StarCraft 2,
and was knocked out of the tournament to everyone's surprise.

In another upset, team fnatic's TTOne, a relatively middle of the pack player, sweeped the German Behemoth Liquid'TLO 2-0 and continued on in the winners bracket. At the end of the day, seven of the top of the eight seeds were either out of the tournament or pushed down into the losers bracket. The four players left in the winners bracket were Liquid'Jinro,
R00t.Slush, Liquid'Machine, and Lazarus Gaming's PainUser.

In the final winners bracket match of the day, between LG PainUser and Liquid'Tyler, when  the game was heavily in Tyler's favor, a technical mishap happened. Apparently, the map that the two were playing on was not the one that had been chosen by the players, so they had to restart the game. With his game a bit thrown off over the mishap, Tyler fell to PainUser 2-0 in two epic games lasting almost thirty minutes each.

Things will finish up tonight here in Dallas. The Halo 3 National Champion will be crowned and receive a whopping $100,000 in prize money. And the very first MLG National Starcraft 2 Champion will also be announced.

If you want even more e-sports coverage to fill your weekend, including an interview with the champion of the StarCraft 2 championships and more coverage from the SoCal regional tournament that's going on this weekend, tune in Live On Three. A webcast featuring lead StarCraft 2 broadcaster Marcus "djWHEAT" Grahm, Rod "Slasher" Breslau, and Team Evil Genisus Manager Scott "Sir Scoots" Smith.