ESL One Cologne 2014

The third CS:GO Major, won by Ninjas in Pyjamas.

Electronic Sports League One Cologne 2014, also known as ESL One Cologne 2014, was the third Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major Championship. The tournament was held during Gamescom 2014 from August 14–17, 2014 at the Cologne Exhibition Centre in Cologne, Germany. It was the second CS:GO Major of 2014. It was organized by Electronic Sports League with sponsorship from Valve. The tournament had a total prize pool of US$250,000.

Quick Facts

Sport: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Location: Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Start date: August 14, 2014
End date: August 17, 2014
Administrator: Valve; ESL
Host: Gamescom 2014
Venue: Cologne Exhibition Centre
Teams: 16 teams

Facts from the source article.

Background

Ninjas in Pyjamas won the event by beating Fnatic 2–1 in the finals. The tournament was livestreamed on the official ESL Twitch channel. Over 400,000 concurrent viewers watched the grand finals, while 2,950,600 total unique viewers watched the event across four days.

Format

The tournament featured seven teams that had already secured their spots as Legends by finishing in the top seven at EMS One Katowice 2014. LGB eSports, which would have been the eighth Legend as the finalist from that event, disbanded before this tournament began. The remaining slots were filled through online qualifiers, which brought in six teams from Europe, one from North America, one from the Oceanic region, and one from India. The competition started with four seeded groups, and every group match was a single best-of-one.

In each group’s opening round, the highest seed faced the lowest seed, while the second and third seeds played each other. The winners of those two matches then competed to become the first team to advance to the playoffs, while the losers played a match that eliminated one team. After one team had advanced and one was eliminated, the two remaining teams played to decide who would take the last playoff spot. This structure is called the GSL format, named after the Global StarCraft II League.

The playoffs consisted of eight teams, two from each group, in a single-elimination bracket where all matches were best-of-three. Seven maps were available, two more than at the previous Major. Train was removed, while Cache, Overpass, and Cobblestone were added. Overpass had been released by Valve just a month earlier, and including a brand-new map so close to a Major sparked some controversy.

During the group stage, each team banned two maps before a match, and the map was then chosen at random from the three remaining. In the playoffs, each team first banned one map, then picked one map. Those two chosen maps became the first two games of the best-of-three. If a third map was needed, it was randomly selected from the three maps that had not been banned or chosen.

Qualifiers

The main European qualifier featured 16 teams. From the regional qualifiers—Open, North, Southeast, and Southwest—four teams each advanced to the tournament. That tournament used a best-of-three, double-elimination bracket, sending six teams to the Major. Another qualifier was a 16-team, single-elimination bracket where only one team earned a Major spot. A separate 8-team, single-elimination bracket also awarded just one Major berth. After LGB eSports disbanded despite placing third at the previous Major, only seven Legends remained. To fill the empty slot, organizers added a team from India via an 8-team qualifier. That qualifier used a round-robin format, with the top four teams moving to a double-elimination bracket.