StarLadder Major: Berlin 2019

Background

Fourteen teams qualified for the Major based on their placement at the previous Major, Katowice 2019, and another ten qualified from their regional qualifiers. The defending champions were Astralis, who had won their second consecutive and third Major at IEM Katowice 2019 and entered tied with Fnatic for the most Major titles. The Major cycle began with four Minors for the Americas, Asia, CIS and Europe, each sending two teams, and because Valve reduced direct invites from sixteen to fourteen, the third-place teams at each Minor went to a play-in that sent two more teams through. The top eight from Katowice were the Legends and the remaining sixteen teams were known as Challengers.

The Major was split into three stages. The New Challengers stage was a Swiss-system tournament in which teams were given an initial Elo ranking based on the HLTV world rankings, with the top eight advancing and the bottom eight eliminated. The New Legends stage was a second Swiss-system group of the same design, and all teams in it except the bottom two earned automatic invites to the following Major. The New Champions stage was an eight-team, best-of-three, single-elimination bracket, and the teams reaching it received Legends status at the next Major. Valve removed Cache from the map pool for a redesign and, instead of bringing back Cobblestone, added Vertigo to a Major pool for the first time.

Astralis's dev1ce was named MVP, joining coldzera as the only players with two Major MVP awards. Among the notable absentees were Luminosity Gaming, Team Envy and the Boston 2018 champions Cloud9, who failed to reach the Americas Minor, and Virtus.pro, OpTic Gaming and Heroic, who missed the Europe Minor.

Did You Know?

• Berlin 2019 was the first Major to feature Vertigo in its map pool.
• dev1ce's MVP award made him only the second player, after coldzera, with two Major MVPs.