ESL One Katowice Offline Qualifier

This Saturday, February 14th will signal the start of the LAN segments of ESL One Katowice, the year's first Valve-sponsored $250,000 tournament. For the first time ever, a major tournament in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive will feature an offline qualifier to determine the final eight teams to advance to the main event.

The venue will be the Angelo Hotel in Katowice, Poland.

16 teams will face off for the opportunity to battle the Legends in March for their share of the prize pool, and half will be sent home with only hopes for the next major accompanying them. Seven of the teams were invited, with the other nine having to claw their way through a series of online qualifiers to secure their ticket to Katowice. One extra spot was up for grabs as Epsilon was disqualified following the bans of three of their players due to match fixing, and a second qualifier spot was handed over as a consequence of The_WinneR's bans.

The standard Valve map pool will be used. With Cobblestone recently receiving massive changes, it will be interesting to see if the map ends up being played at all.

The qualifier will be conducted under a double-elimination best-of-one format, with each group concluding with two decider matches to determine the final two to advance. The first two teams to notch two wins will proceed to the main event, while the four teams with only one loss will be the ones facing off in the decider matches.

Group A:

Titan LGB eSports Team Liquid Gamers2

Counter Logic Gaming Flipsid3 Tactics Copenhagen Wolves PiTER-ONLINE


Group B:

Cloud9 Team Dignitas 3DMAX KaBuM.TD

mousesports Vox Eminor ESC Gaming INSHOCK

Group A

Group A can be considered the Group of Death, with only one real favorite and one apparent underdog. Titan will be primed to top the group after back-to-back top-two performances at ASUS ROG and IOS Pantamera, but the volatile nature of best of ones may pave the way for an upset as on their heels will be a string of Tier 2 teams capable of making a splash. PiTER-ONLINE is the lone dark horse after qualifying through an eight-team CIS qualifier that saw Flipsid3 knocked out after their first match. According to our staff, LGB is also looking like a great contender to advance.

The other staff favorites are Gamers2 and, of course, Team Liquid, but Flipsid3 is more than capable of clinching an early spot even with their star AWPer on the sidelines. Counter Logic Gaming, a team with extremely high highs and low lows, could easily find themselves in the main event as well. The most surprising observation of this group's predictions is the apparent lack of American patriotism however, with only one person having both Liquid and CLG advancing. Bless you, LMP.

Group B

The two heavy favorites to make it out of Group B are Cloud9 and Dignitas. Both teams have players with a breadth of experience on the big stage and are the frontrunners to challenge the Legends once again. Following suit is the Finnish squad of 3DMAX who recently displayed a valiant performance at ASUS ROG in front of their home crowd. Their star player, Aleksi "allu" Jalli, will be looking to put his stamp on the world, and to do that he will first have to lead his team to the main event.

KaBuM, after impressive showings on Mirage against Cloud9 and Fnatic, will go into the qualifier slightly handicapped as their opponents are certain to ban the map from play. After bootcamping in Colorado following the conclusion of Clutch Con, the Brazilians may have honed their strategies on other maps and will be looking to take the last spot over mousesports and ESC Gaming. The most interesting team of this group may be the Australians, however, as they have shown small sparks before in the majors and the opportunity to see them play is rare for international fans. INSHOCK, after qualifying through the Polish regional qualifier, will be the underdog in a similar fashion to PiTER-ONLINE, but the team shows a better chance of advancing with a less difficult group and the experienced players Mariusz "Loord" Cybulski and Michał "MICHU" Müller at the helm.

ESL TV

StormStudio

ESL TV Spain

+ Show Spoiler [Group A] +

CLG 16 ( Cache ) 14 Gamers2
Titan 28 ( Cache ) 24 PITER
CLG 16 ( Dust2 ) 14 Titan
Gamers2 17 ( Mirage ) 19 PITER
LGB 16 ( Inferno ) 8 CPH Wolves
Team Liquid 14 ( Mirage ) 16 Flipsid3
LGB 16 ( Inferno ) 11 Flipsid3
Team Liquid 10 ( Mirage ) 16 CPH Wolves
PiTER 3 ( Mirage ) 16 Flipsid3
Titan 16 ( Nuke ) 4 CPH Wolves

+ Show Spoiler [Group B] +

Cloud9 16 ( Inferno ) 2 INSHOCK
KaBuM.TD 10 ( Dust2 ) 16 Mousesports
Cloud9 16 ( Dust2 ) 14 Mousesports
INSHOCK 11 ( Nuke ) 16 KaBuM.TD
3DMAX 11 ( Mirage ) 16 Vox Eminor
Dignitas 16 ( Mirage ) 11 ESC
Vox Eminor 16 ( Inferno ) 13 Dignitas
3DMAX 16 ( Mirage ) 8 ESC
KaBuM.TD 16 ( Inferno ) 3 Dignitas
Mousesports 8 ( Cache ) 16 3DMAX