ESL Announces Pro Tour With Exclusivity
Big news out of the ESL today, as the major CS:GO tournament organizer announced a new structure for their tournament circuit for the 2019-2020 season. This new ESL Pro Tour seems like an interesting evolution, but has some concerned about the change.
The new format clarifies the difference between the Challenger and Master tiers of tournaments, with Opens below the former and the top two competitions, IEM Katowice and ESL ONE Cologne above the latter.
In addition to the changed format, ESL also announced to total prize pool across the tour would bump up to over $5 million, bringing a much-needed boost to prizing for some of the smaller events.
While many fans were initially excited to see the changes ESL had made, the joy quickly turned to anger as some more inquisitive members began digging into the new rules for the circuit which unveiled some shocking changes.
ESL Pro League Exclusivity Agreement
In a part of the new rules discussing team participation in other tournaments, ESL wrote,
“Beginning January 1st 2020, all member teams of ProLeague shall not play in other Counter-Strike leagues, this means non Valve sponsored competitions where the first day of competition (excluding qualifiers) and the grand final day are more than fourteen (14) days apart, besides Pro League.
All member teams of Pro League shall limit their tournament participation days, meaning the active competition days of a tournament they participate in regardless of if they play on that day or not, to not more than 60 days per calendar year (not including travel, media days, or break days). This number excludes official Valve competitions such as Minors and Majors, online qualifiers, and also excludes Pro League competition days. Exceptions to the number of tournament days allowed can be granted by the Members Meeting.”
According to DeKay, this rule change would basically force teams to miss ECS and other non-ESL events throughout the year with only 60 days allowed to be spent on events outside the circuit.
With less low-tier tournaments for teams to be able to participate in and try things out, it’s likely we’ll either see teams are more hesitant to make big roster changes or we’ll see more upsets as teams try to test out synergy between new players at events.
So far, it appears only two teams are holding out and have yet to agree to the format, with Richard Lewis reporting that Twitch has been stepping in with huge sums of money to convince the rest to jump on board.
We’ll have to wait and see whether or not these last two teams will buy-in to the system, but it’s safe to say the changes are going to have a rippling effect on the rest of the scene.
As always, we’ll keep you updated as more information comes to light on the ESL Pro Tour.
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