IEM Katowice 2024 preview

As we’ve gotten used to, IEM Katowice will be the first $1 million event of the new Counter-Strike season. The tournament takes place in Poland, between January 31 – February 11. This will be the first major test of the year and it will reveal to some extent just how well the new rosters work.

In Counter-Strike 2, teams tend to make a lot of roster moves near the end of the season, especially if they didn’t get the results they wanted that year. This time, the roster moves began much earlier and were quite spectacular.

Heroic went from being one of the world’s best teams to being just another top 20 team, Natus Vincere lost Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev for the first time in many years, Cloud9 strengthened their roster with the signing of Kirill “Boombl4” Mikhaylov, G2 Esports replaced Justin “jks” Savage and their coach, Jan “Swani” Muller, and Team Falcons completed their roster.

The only problem for Falcons is that most of the players they wanted said no to them, which left them in a desperate situation. They eventually made serious compromises but still managed to get two excellent players who might carry the roster to great victories: Emil “Magisk” Reif and the Spanish superstar, Alvaro “SunPayus” Garcia.

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— Intel® Extreme Masters (@IEM) January 15, 2024

IEM Katowice participants

IEM Katowice 2024 brings together these 24 teams:

• G2 Esports
• MOUZ
• Natus Vincere
• Monte
• FaZe Clan
• Team Vitality
• Team Falcons
• Complexity Gaming
• Rebels Gaming
• Cloud9
• Virtus.pro
• Heroic
• FURIA Esports
• M80
• Rooster
• The MongolZ
• BIG
• GamerLegion
• Apeks
• Astralis
• Eternal Fire
• BetBoom Team
• ENCE
• Team Spirit

Many of these teams are much weaker than the top ones. Even former great names, such as ENCE, cannot be taken seriously at this point. Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander is probably not enjoying the situation very much. When he accepted to join ENCE, the team had Guy “NertZ” Ilus, and SunPayus. Now it has a lot of former 9INE members.

Still, even under these conditions, he might be able to do something spectacular. The individuals have talent, but they need a great leader to show them how to win. Will gla1ve be able to provide that leadership? We’ll have to see. Back when he was the IGL of Astralis, he could always count on Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz. But now he has no superstars to rely on. Just teamwork.

Format

The format of IEM Katowice will be the usual one: a play-in stage followed by two groups of eight. The top three teams from each group advance to the playoffs. The first two stages use a double-elimination format with best-of-three matches, apart from the first round of the play-in stage, which uses the best-of-one match format.

The Grand Final will be a best-of-five series.

Header: ESL