Future wins Cheeseadelphia 2025 StarCraft II tournament

The Future is now. North American StarCraft II player Joseph "Future" Stanish continued his dominance at Cheeseadelphia with his third win in the past year-and-a-half after his 4-3 victory over Polish player Mateusz "Gerald" Budziak in the best-of-seven grand finals at Cheeseadelphia 2025. It was a rare international matchup in the domestic LAN series that typically features North American players.

Future won the Cheeseadelphia Spring LAN last year and the Cheeseadelphia Grand Finals in December to close out the 2024 Cheese circuit. The Terran player was also a Cheeseadelphia winner in 2018 making him one of the winningest Cheeseadelphia players of all time.

Photo credit: Ben Beaver / Nerd Street

Cheeseadelphia 2025 took place at Localhost Philadelphia, bringing together many of the best North American StarCraft II players to compete for a share of the nearly $6,000 prize pot. The LAN tournament started with six rounds of Swiss competition for the 28 players. Future and Gerald both finished 5-1 during the Swiss stage as well as Pavel "PiLiPiLi" Pilipenko and Paul "Dolan" Dolan. Future, Gerald, PiLiPiLi and Dolan all advanced to the playoffs, and so did Alex "Epic" Damian, Mike "fullheart" Harward, John "starkiller" Puchalski and Christoper "jheffe" Hefferon.

The playoffs were an eight-player single elimination bracket. Future dropped a map in both the quarterfinals and semifinals en route to the final. Gerald won his quarterfinal matchup 3-0, but was challenged in the semifinals where he was down 0-2 to Epic before pulling off the reverse sweep to win 3-2. Future held the upper hand in the final, going up 2-0 and 3-1, but Gerald mounted a comeback to tie it 3-3 before Future won the decisive seventh game.

Besides Future, a few other players who qualified for the playoffs had either won Cheeseadelphia before or come close to winning. Dolan won the Cheeseadelphia Summer LAN last year, jheffe finished second to Future in the Cheeseadelphia 2024 Grand Finals, and Epic finished second at the Cheeseadelphia Spring LAN and Cheeseadelphia X back in 2019.

Cheeseadelphia is one of the most popular and longest running StarCraft II LAN tournament series in North America. It was first organized by Nerd Street in 2015, and has been held almost every year since then with multiple tournaments some years. Almost all Cheeseadelphias have been played on LAN in Philadelphia.

Lead photo credit: Ben Beaver / Nerd Street