Tournament review: Northern American Starcraft League

Featuring almost all the top players in the world this is a league based tournament full of action. You can check the website at http://nasl.tv/
The NASL was developed by Russ Pfister, owner of the video-game coaching website Gosucoaching. The prizes exceed 100.000 dollars so this tournament can be called anything but serious!
There is one huge advantage for Americans and Europeans and that is the streaming time. You can tune in every day at NASL.TV to see matches as they are aired at 6pm PST and 9pm EST. The rebroadcast of the show is at 6pm GMT and 7pm CET every night. Basically you get reasonable hours instead of having to get up at 2-3 AM in the morning as is the case with GSL.
There is a free stream that you can watch but of course it is of lower quality and you do not get access to vods. What I mean by lower quality is that you can't watch 1080p.
The price for a pass is 25 dollars which is rather low considering you get more hours of footage then you get for a GSL seeason. There are also zero commercials if you buy the pass.
This being the first tournament organised by NASL there have been some problems, ranging from lag to bad sound quality for the casters to one of the casters talking too loud at times cough Gretorp cough. The tournament is casted by EG.Incontrol and Gretorp with guest appearances from other known casters. While some might not agree with how Gretorp commentates(read: gets overexcited) he is making efforts to improve the commentary and it is showing. The tournament is streamed in high quality 1080 on justintv. This is a two-edged sword because on some computers you can't actually watch such a high quality stream(laptops!!). They have changed this option so that you can watch in 720p, 480p, 360p and 240p quality. The lag problems and to a certain extent the sound problems have also been fixed.
There are 50 top players divided into groups of 10. Each player competes against every player in his group in a best-of-three match. At the end of the season the top two in each season qualify to be flown for the live-finals.
I could give some examples of good players but the truth is they all are: OGS.MC(toss bonjwa), White-ra(grandpa toss), TLO, HasuObs, Sjow, Tyler, Kiwikaki, EG.Incontrol, EG.Idra, Morrow, Boxer(long live the Emperor!), July(Sauron zerg), Goody(panzer general) and many more.
As a sidenote there is no option to pay by paypal for this tournament, at this moment at least, so this might be a deterrent. You can pay by credit card.
Some have said they will wait for a second season to buy a ticket because by then all problems will be solved and the organizers will have more experience. This is a personal choice but I will say one thing, this tournament will only get better and it is good now!