ESL Pro Tour Scheduled for 2020
ESL and DreamHack will be teaming up together in 2020 to launch a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive global circuit tour in 2020, called the ESL Pro Tour. The Pro Team is said to have over $5 million in prizes.
The Pro Tour will link over 20 different ESL and DreamHack tournaments and leagues across five continents and will be organized in two different levels: The Challenger and the Masters.
Players competing in the DreamHack Open, the Mountain Dew League and the ESL National Championships will have a chance to qualify for the Masters, which will then be made up of arena tournaments worth up to $250,000.
The Masters level will include the ESL One, Intel Extreme Masters, DreamHack Masters and the ESL CS:GO Pro League. The top ranked teams in the ESL Pro Tour Rankings will then go on to compete in the two Masters championship finals, ESL One Cologne in Germany, and the Intel Extreme Masters in Katowice, Poland.
Ralf Reichert, ESL CEO said that the partnership between the ESL and DreamHack will give young players a clearer and more complete path to becoming somebody and will add a structure that is more welcoming and digestible for new esports fans.
“ESL’s growth in recent years has led us to rethink what we are doing. We have built some of the world’s most impressive esports tournaments, and it was the time to connect the dots where the outcome is a bigger picture that fits better with our vision for esports,” he said.
The DreamHack CEO said something similar in that the collaboration will provide a deeper meaning and purpose to all of the properties, allowing them to provide fans with far more thrilling experiences than before.
From the looks of the ESL Pro Tour structure, the top-rated tournaments in the Challenger competitions will qualify for some of the Masters competitions, along with teams that could receive auto-berths into those competitions. More details on the structure though, will be released on 28 September.
Competitions such as the ESL National Championship and DreamHack Open are hosted multiple times a year and provide a place for players from all walks of life to qualify for the big-time. The ESL National Championship is held in over 14 countries worldwide, while the DreamHack Open consists of a Summer and Winter competitions, with a few launched and interspersed in between.
The first Challenger competition opens in Leipzig in 2020, from January 24 to January 26 with the DreamHack Open. The next, following up in Anaheim is another DreamHack, nearer the end of February. The top teams from those two tournaments will then qualify for the Masters Championship at Intel Extreme Masters in Katowice, Poland, which is also stated as February (although based on the diagrams, it could easily be March too).
Another four Masters tournaments will then follow in April, two in June and another in early July to make way for the next Masters Championship
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