ESL Introduces Format Changes To CS: GO IEM Katowice Event

ESL has announced changes to the format of the upcoming Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament at IEM Katowice, in a blog post on their website today. The changes mainly concern the introduction of an ELO seeding system in order to better place teams into appropriate matchups within the Swiss Format of the New Challengers and New Legends stage. this will make the event more like IEM Chicago last November, where teams were ranked in the group stage according to their skill.

We've introduced changes to the #IEM Katowice 2019 competitive format to make it the most balanced #CSGO Major ever!

Learn all about them here ? https://t.co/KvHpmZOGKt pic.twitter.com/Tckesb43ih

— Intel®ExtremeMasters (@IEM) January 21, 2019

“The initial seeding for Swiss will be crowdsourced from the teams themselves similarly to the method used at IEM Chicago 2018. All sixteen teams in this particular stage will be asked to rank their fifteen opponents based on skill. Individual team votes that are outside of the expected range of the spread will be discarded in order to eliminate anomalies (e.g. a team giving a team #15 when most other teams rated them as #1) as a precaution to rule out collusion,” came the announcement. “After the initial seeding is done, teams will be assigned ELO ratings that correspond to their position in the seeding (high seeding = more points). Every single Swiss round will be seeded according to each team’s current ELO ranking.  Each team’s ELO will be adjusted after matches get played and teams will be paired according to this seeding, with the exception that repeated matches cannot take place.”

Additionally, all advancement and elimination matches will be best-of-three, to give the teams a better chance of avoiding an unfortunate elimination based on a single match. You can read the full list of changes on the official blog post, here.