ESL One Katowice 2014

Lore & Background

The top eight teams from Dreamhack Winter 2013 qualified as Legends. Two teams were directly invited to participate in the tournament, while the remaining six teams qualified through an online qualifier that consisted of sixteen teams. Teams were split up into four groups, and all group matches were best-of-ones. The highest seed would play the lowest seed in each group and the second and third seeds would play against each other. The winner of those two matches would play each other to determine which team moved on to the playoff stage, while the losers of the first round of matches also played. The loser of the lower match was then eliminated from the tournament. With one team advanced and one eliminated, the two remaining teams would play an elimination match for the second playoff spot. This format is known as the GSL format, named for the Global StarCraft II League. The playoffs bracket consisted of eight teams, two from each group. All of these matches were best-of-three, single elimination. Teams advanced in the bracket until a winner was decided.

In Their Own Story

The Spodek hummed before the first round even started. Not the low electrical buzz of the arena's lighting rigs, but a deeper vibration, felt in the soles of your shoes through the concrete floor of the player's tunnel. You could smell the cold air seeping in from the loading dock mixed with the warm, metallic tang of the arena's ventilation. Frost was already at his station, headset on, eyes closed, running through his utility lines in his head. The monitor showed the dusty orange of a de_dust2 bombsite, the crosshair still a faint green dot in the center of the screen.

Somewhere above, through the steel ribs of the dome, the crowd was a single breathing organism. Five thousand people. In 2014, that was a lot of people to be watching you try to out-aim a man in a different country. The caster's voice drifted down through the PA system, building the narrative, naming the players, setting the stakes. You could hear the Polish in the crowd, the English, the muffled laughter when a teammate fumbled a flash. The round timer was at forty seconds. You pulled your headset tighter, exhaled, and the green dot became a white crosshair, and the world narrowed to the space between your trigger finger and the next pixel.

Reader's Guide

There were five maps to choose from: Dust II, Inferno, Mirage, Nuke, and Train. In the group stage, each team banned two maps and the match was played on the remaining map. In the playoffs, each team banned one map and chose one map; the remaining map would be the decider map of the best-of-three series, if needed.

Did You Know?

• Only teams from Europe competed in the main qualifier tournament.
• Team iBUYPOWER from the United States and Vox Eminor from Australia did not have to play in any qualifier and were invited to play in the Major.
• The tournament had a peak of over 250,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch.