Hearthstone’s Winter Championship will fly south to the Bahamas — with a $250,000 prize purse

Considering how cold and miserable it is in most of the Northern Hemisphere right now, the Bahamas sound lovely … especially with some high-level Hearthstone play to keep you entertained.

Blizzard announced today that the Winter Championship for its Hearthstone Championship Tour will take place in the Bahamas at the Melia Nassau Beach resort from March 23 to March 26. Some of the best players of the digital card game behemoth will compete there for a $250,000 prize pool. The top four players will also earn a berth to the Hearthstone World Championships — at a shot at the world champ title — at BlizzCon late in 2017. Hearthstone is one of the most popular games in growing esports market, and it’s in a clear lead in the digital card games sector.

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The competition will feature the top four players from each of the Hearthstone Championship Tour regions: Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and China. After group play, the top eight competitors will then fight in a single-elimination bracket to decide the winner. You can read the full rules for the tournament here.

This is one of the first major events for official Hearthstone esports in 2017, which introduced changes to the championship tour system (and doubled the year’s prize pool from $1 million in 2016 to $2 million).

Blizzard had noted before that it plans to time tournaments to more closely follow the release of new card sets. The latest expansion, Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, came out in early December. We usually have to wait a few months between these releases, so it’s likely that the Winter Championship will take place before the release of a new card set.