The Intel Extreme Masters already started and just a few hours separate us from the kick-off of the Counter-strike: Global Offensive tournament. Even though the disipline will have a side tournament with only four teams participating, it shapes to be an interesting one, as the teams taking part of it have improved their performances with the pass of the tournaments. A trio of local teams and a Slovak troop will battle in the city of Katowice to get title of the first IEM event featuring the latest Valve's first-person-shooter game, and of course, the main slice of the $7000 prize pool.


The first IEM event in CS:GO era is about to kick-off!

Below you will find everything you need to know regarding the schedule of the event in the CS:GO discipline. Its worth recalling that a single elimination system was chosen for the tournament, and each one of the match-ups will be defined after a best-of-three battle.



The teams:

ESC Gaming: Kings at home ?
The main local favourite is without any doubt ESC Gaming , who have improved their performance since the migration to the new game. After proving themselves at LAN in the past Northcon edition, where they finished in second place, the Golden Five are ready to continue their successful history in counter-strike, this time attemping to win the first Extreme Masters tourney for the game.

ESC ICY BOX lineup:


MaxFloPlay: on the search to be the Polish elite
The first team to get its passport to the main stage of the event, MaxFloPlay also come from showing a decent performance at German territory in an offline tournament, as they ended in a sixth place at Northcon. They also proved to be in a high level amongst the polish teams, as they managed to surpass rivals as DELTA on the opening online qualifier which was reserved for teams from Poland.

MaxFloPlay are:


myDGB: the slovak threat
This is another of the squads that for sure will be worth to follow closely in the competition, as it promises a big performance improvement with the addition of Marek ".PhP" Kadek a little more than a week ago, after the departure of Tomáš 'oskar!' Šťastný. This event will mean the first LAN test for the troop after the lineup change, but they already got good results for example at the Mind Sports Festival where they placed third.

myDGB roster is composed by:


ALSEN Team: tournament's surprise ?
Last but not least, ALSEN is the third local squadron that will participate in the tourney. It took them the participation in two qualifiers to get a spot in the main tournament as they failed to surpass the semifinals of the second qualifier (lost against ESC), but later, defeated all their rivals on the last polish qualifier. Now they aim to Katowice with hope to be the tournament's surprise.

ALSEN Team roster:


Now that the teams are presented, it is your turn to share your on prediction. To do it, you can vote in the following poll and also posting a comment. Stick to SK Gaming as we will bring you all the updates regarding the IEM Katowice Counter-strike: Global Offensive's tournament !

You can also click here to follow the tournament's statistics and results. Don't forget to place you bets!