With just a week until Global Challenge Cologne begins, ESL has released the groups for their Starcraft II tournament. SK Gaming's Fredrik 'MaDFroG' Johansson is in a very tough looking Group A alongside the man he played at last weekend's regionals, Dario 'TLO' Wünsch. The pool is finished off with Oleksii 'White-Ra' Krupnik and Carlo 'Cloud' Giannacco. Like all four groups, this one has at least one player of each race and two terrans.

The full list of groups looks like this:

Group A
Fredrik 'MaDFroG' Johansson
Dario 'TLO' Wünsch
Oleksii 'White-Ra' Krupnik
Carlo 'Cloud' Giannacco

Group B
Chris 'HuK' Loranger
Tomasz 'Tarson' Boroń
Pavel 'BratOK' Kuznetsov
Dan 'Artosis' Stemkoski

Group C
Dmitriy 'Dimaga' Filipchuk

Dennis 'HasuObs' Schneider
Pierre 'SarenS' Guivarch

Group D
Benjamin 'DeMusliM' Baker
Gregory 'IdrA' Fields
Eugene 'Strelok' Oparyshev
Johan 'Naniwa' Lucchesi

Global Challenge Cologne begins on August 18. This will be the first major international LAN event for SC2. As the official post says, it will be a great look at the game's current balance. But more importantly it will show us exactly who are the players to beat in the early stage of the game.