ESL Pro Tour 2025 Reveal – Making Sense Of All The Changes

On Oct. 14, ESL unveiled the first details regarding the CS ESL Pro Tour 2025, including event dates, locations, format changes, and invitation process. Here’s all the good stuff.

New Invitation Process

With Valve getting more involved in the pro circuit in 2025, tournament organizers are forced to adhere to new rules proposed by the developer, including the invitation process for their tournaments.

Streamlining the tournament invitation approach across the whole scene should make the CS2 professional circuit feel more holistic and merit-based. However, Valve must always keep an eye on the ranking and update its formula if necessary.

$22M+ Investment

ESL has pledged an annual $11M+ contribution to the teams and players participating in their circuit throughout 2025 and 2026.

Further details are said to be revealed soon. ESL also mentioned that the Intel Grand Slam is not going anywhere, and teams will still have the chance to fight for the $1M cash prize.

EPT 2025 Calendar

ESL Pro Tour 2025 Reveal
Credit: ESL

So far ESL has announced seven events for their 2025 Pro Tour:

The two EPT championship events IEM Katowice and IEM Cologne are to return virtually unchanged.

IEM Dallas and IEM Chengdu return as EPT Masters events, with the location for IEM Spring yet to be announced.

Both 2025 ESL Pro League seasons will be held in Europe, albeit probably not in Malta as they have been for the past couple of years.

Excluding Dallas and Chengdu, ESL seems to be focusing their attention on hosting events in Europe, which is a smart decision.

ESL Pro League Format Changes

There have been many complaints over the years about the EPL format being too long and drawn out, so ESL decided to switch it up.

If ESL manages to eliminate the seeding problem, as they already did with the BO1, then EPL could become one of the most exciting CS2 tournaments of the season in 2025, especially for fans of CS2 betting.

Bruno Sobieraj
Bruno Sobieraj

Since: September 16, 2023

My name is Bruno and my love for Counter-Strike was sparked when the Polish Virtus.pro was plowing through opponents from 2014 to 2018. Since then, I’ve been dreaming of working in esports and here I am.

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