image source: ESL One
ESL One Katowice, the third Major of the Dota Pro Circuit, will welcome 16 teams to Poland in February.
January 2018 is a very busy month for all the teams and their fans. There will be three Minors and one Major LAN events happening, with two Majors following up in the month of February and March, which makes the qualifiers schedule extremely busy as well.
ESL One Katowice Major is set to take place February 20-25 at the Spodek Arena in Katowice, Poland and the open qualifiers for it will run at the same time with the Captain’s Draft 4.0 Minor LAN playoffs, on January 6-7. The closed qualifiers will commence in all the six big regions only two days after Moonduck’s event will finish in Washington, DC.
ESL One Katowice qualifiers schedule:
Open qualifiers:
Saturday - 06.01.2018
Sunday - 07.01.2018
Closed qualifiers:
Tuesday - 09.01.2018
Wednesday - 10.01.2018
Thursday - 11.01.2018
Friday - 12.01.2018
It’s expected that all the details about the open and regional qualifiers, along with the direct invites to the event to be announced soon. According to the ESL One official announcement, “on top of the successful open qualifiers teams, a handful of teams will be directly invited and seeded into each regional closed qualifier”.
ESL One Katowice features a $1,000,000 prize pool and 1,500 qualifier points and same as all the ESL events from 2018 will accommodate 16 teams. Earlier this week, ESL officially announced that they standardized all their events to a 16 teams line-up and six-day competition. The format applies for all the ESL One, Intel Extreme Masters and ESL Pro League events.
“We wanted to make sure we change it to set clear expectation for everyone in the ecosystem as to how many teams are going to be at a specific event, and then how many of those do we invite, and based on what criteria, and then how do the rest of the slots get determined,” said Ulrich Schulze, ESL Vice President for The Esports Observer.
In each competition, the 16 teams will be divided into two groups for the first three days of double elimination group play, with the top winners there advancing to the tournament playoffs.
