IEM Katowice 2023 Participants

IEM Katowice 2023 is a $1 million CS:GO tournament scheduled to take place between January 31 – February 12. The event will feature 24 teams and will practically be a Major in everything but name and format.

Recently, ESL has announced who the 24 participants are and the list is exciting. Almost all the top teams will compete in this amazing tournament, so if you’re a CS:GO fan, you do not want to miss it.

IEM Katowice 2023 play-in Teams

Just like a CS:GO Major, IEM Katowice treats eight of the 24 teams differently. These teams will skip the play-in stage and will start playing only in the group stage.

The goal of ESL was likely to give as many teams the opportunity to take part in this great event but at the same time, to narrow the number of participants enough to avoid overwhelming the home audience.

These are the play-in teams:

• Ninjas in Pyjamas
• Team Spirit
• Cloud9
• Complexity Gaming
• FURIA Esports
• MIBR
• IHC Esports
• Grayhound Gaming
• OG
• ENCE
• BIG
• Sprout
• paiN Gaming
• Evil Geniuses
• Fnatic
• Permitta Esports

Eight of these 16 teams will advance to the group stage. These are the favorites, at least on paper:

• Cloud9
• NiP
• FURIA Esports
• OG
• BIG
• ENCE
• Sprout
• Fnatic

Team Spirit and Complexity also have a good chance of qualifying. So in total, there are around 10 teams who will compete for eight spots in the group stage.

Directly invited teams

The eight directly qualified teams are these:

• FaZe Clan
• Team Vitality
• Outsiders
• Heroic
• Team Liquid
• Natus Vincere
• G2 Esports
• MOUZ

We’ve already seen most of these teams in action at BLAST Premier: World Final. At the moment, G2 seem to be really strong, while Na’Vi are in desperate need of a strong fifth man.

Viktor “sdy” Orudzhev is a good player and probably significantly better than Andrii “npl” Kukharskyi, the 17-year-old tested by Na’Vi at the tournament. But Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev wants to win titles, and this version of Na’Vi doesn’t seem capable of doing that.

Heroic will be back to their standard roster by the time the tournament begins, so they’ll likely play much better than they did at BLAST Premier: World Final, where they finished seventh-eight.

MOUZ have not played since the semifinals of IEM Rio Major. But the fact that they got so far at the Major suggests that they’re very strong right now.

Vitality will need to decide what the plan is for 2023. In 2022 they’ve had some good results but they’re still not at the level where they wanted to be when they began this epic project.

Header: ESL