The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Intel Extreme Masters will hit the Windy City like a barrage from the Terrorists’ MAC-10 on November 10th and 11th. Actually, the pre-show and group stages start on the Tuesday, November 6th … but the real fun begins over the weekend. The top online sportsbooks BetOnline will be covering the event, so we can check in with them when it gets closer to tournament weekend.
Who Will Be There?
The prize pool for the CS: GO IEM Chicago is by no means chump change. At 250,000.00 dollars, many of your favorite Counter-Strike teams will be shooting it out to win their cut of the pile of cash that is waiting in Chicago’s South Side at the Wintrust Arena.
A total of 16 professional CS: GO teams will be in attendance. Ten will be there on invites, and another six will qualify their way into the tournament. At the time of writing, five teams have already qualified: Out of South America came Luminosity, eUNITED was the North American qualifier, NORTH and ANVANGAR were the European qualifiers, MVP PK qualified out of the ASIA region. The sixth team will come from the UCC League.
Here is the full list of teams to-date:
- Astralis
- MouseEsports
- Team Liquid
- FaZe Clan
- BIG
- MiBR
- NRG Esports
- NA’VI
- Renegades
- Fnatic
- Luminosity
- eUNITED
- North
- MVP PK
- AVANGAR
- ????????
Likely Favorites to Take Chicago
Astralis has been on a hot streak. The team from Denmark: devIce, dupreeh, Xyp9x, gla1ve, and Magisk have been smothering their opponents as of late. MiBR took the Astralis to right to the brink at the Blast Pro Series Istanbul on September 29th. But Astralis was able to pull off the 16-14 victory by the skin of their teeth in the Inferno map to win the tournament. They took home $125,000.00 and Made in Brazil snatched up $50k for their second place effort.
More impressive is Astralis’ consistency of late. They also won the FACEIT Major in London and took home $500,000.00 by absolutely gunning down the competition. Na’ Vi felt the pain, getting beat in the Final 6-16 and then 9-16 at Wembley Arena. Astralis also won the CS: GO Premier in July, utterly smoking Team Liquid and appeared in the DreamHack Stockholm Finals losing to North on the third map.
With their undeviating play, Astralis is likely to be listed as the overall favorite to win the tournament in Chicago. MiBR has been known to give Astralis a run for their money and both North, and Na’ Vi have beaten Astralis in recent tournaments so they should each be near the top of the list as well.
ESL Pro League S8 and ECL Play
We will have a better idea of how each team will be seeded as ECL and ESL S8 play continues through the month of October. Astralis has already beaten Ninjas in Pyjamas in ECL Group Stage play. And Astralis will face, BIG, Fnatic, North, and Na’ Vi among others in the ESL Pro League S8 throughout October. The ongoing results from each of these teams should factor highly into how they are ranked by oddsmakers at the Intel Extreme Masters in Chicago.
Don’t miss this IEM event. It is a full-on basketball arena that will be packed out with screaming CS: GO fans tickets are available to see the event live for as little as twenty-nine dollars and of course, you can tune into the action live from your gaming room on Twitch.