ESL Challenger Rotterdam preview

ESL Challenger Rotterdam is an A-tier CS:GO tournament that lasts for just three days. It is scheduled to take place between October 14-16 and some of its participants are actually very strong teams that will play at IEM Rio Major.

It’s quite surprising to see ENCE, MOUZ, and Outsiders competing at an event like this just two weeks before the Major but they’ve probably decided to travel to Brazil immediately after and start their bootcamp with a LAN.

ESL Challenger Rotterdam details

ESL Challenger Rotterdam offers $100.000 in prize money and half of the amount will go to the winner. The competitive format of the tournament is very basic. For the group stage, the eight teams will be divided into two groups of four. Elimination and decider matches are best-of-three. The remaining matches are best-of-one.

The best two teams from each group will then compete in the playoffs, which will consist of a single-elimination bracket. Every match during this stage is best-of-three.

The location of this LAN event is Rotterdam, so the matches start every day at around 10:30 CET.

Participants

Here are the teams that will take part in ESL Challenger Rotterdam:

• MOUZ
• Movistar Riders
• Eternal Fire
• Nixuh
• ENCE
• Outsiders
• Fluxo
• Team oNe

The first four of these teams will play in group A, while the bottom four will play in group B.

Favorites

The big favorites of the tournament are obviously ENCE, MOUZ, and Outsiders. Movistar Riders and Eternal Fire are not bad teams either, but based on the recent RMRs for IEM Rio Major, it’s clear that they’re considerably weaker than the first three.

Group A is much easier than group B, so MOUZ shouldn’t have any problems qualifying for the playoffs. In group B, ENCE and Outsiders are almost guaranteed to be the winners. But because of the format, one of them will need to play a decider match against either oNe or Fluxo. Of course, all of this calculation assumes that ENCE and Outsiders will win their opening matches.

The winner of the tournament will most likely be MOUZ or Outsiders. The two teams proved to be very strong in the RMRs for IEM Major and despite the fact that ENCE finished the qualifiers with a perfect score, they weren’t really tested. The opponents they had to face were HEET, Team Falcons, and BIG.

Arguably, ENCE had a very easy path to IEM Rio Major, so their 3 W – 0 L record is not that relevant. However, if the Finish team manage to win at ESL Challenger DreamHack Rotterdam, then they truly are as good as their statistics indicate.

Header: ESL