Fans of the Dota 2 Europe esports scene may have been a bit disappointed when their favorite teams didn’t take part in the ongoing BTS Pro Series 3. This could be because most of the teams took part in the OMEGA League. There’s some good news though, as ESL One Germany 2020 is just around the corner.
The tournament is going to start on October 5 with the Grand Finals scheduled on November 1. If you’re keeping count, that’s almost a month of Dota matches. While this is considered as a Tier 2 tournament, it has a prize pool of $400,000. The tournament isn’t limited to Europe either, and also includes the CIS region.
There’s going to be 16 teams taking part in the tournament with 12 of them getting direct invites. The remaining four need to go through a qualifier.
So far the teams that received direct invites are:
- Team Secret
- OG
- Team Nigma
- Team Liquid
- Alliance
- Ninjas in Pyjamas
- Natus Vincere
- Vikin.gg
- HellRaisers
- 5men
FlyToMoon was originally given a direct invite, but their roster was recently signed on by Na’Vi on a trial basis. The other team to get an invite was Virtus.pro, but last week they made the decision to withdraw from the tournament. In a statement posted on Twitter, Virtus.pro revealed that their roster is going on an inactive status mainly because they have “not been performing as expected in the recent months.”
So who’s going to fill up the void? Our guess is that one of them is probably Evil Geniuses given that they did manage to take part in the OMEGA League. For the other one, it’s going to be difficult considering that most of the other teams are in the qualifiers.
Speaking of the Qualifiers, it’s going to be a three-day event which begins on September 25 and ends on September 27. Eight teams are going to fight for the four available slots.
You’re probably wondering why the tournament is so long. This is because ESL has made some changes to how the Group Stage is going to be played out. These are the details:
- Schedule: October 5-20
- Modified Swiss-system Format
- Five Rounds of Matches
- Teams never play an opponent twice
- Three wins to proceed to playoffs
What this means is at the end of the Group Stage, eight teams are going to qualify for the Upper Bracket, four are going to the Lower Bracket, and the remaining four are eliminated.
There’s no question that this tournament is going to be another exciting one. What do you think? Is Team Secret going to dominate this one again or is there going to be an upset? Let us know in the comments section below.
