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.
- ESL previously used their own ESL World Ranking to invite teams to their events.
- That will not be possible in 2025, since Valve introduced the Valve Regional Standings (VRS).
- VRS are to be used by all TOs when sending out tournament invites. The same rule applies to ESL with the EPT 2025.
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.
- This investment is set to come on top of the hospitality spend already included in each event.
- This investment could be ESL’s way to entice the top teams toward attending their events.
- With the 2025 calendar being so packed, TOs are doing everything in their power to attract the best CS2 teams in the world to come to their events and skip their competitors’ tournaments instead.
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

So far ESL has announced seven events for their 2025 Pro Tour:
- IEM Katowice 2025, Jan 29 – Feb 3, Katowice, Poland
- ESL Pro League Season 21, Feb 25 – Mar 16, Europe
- IEM Spring 2025, Apr 21-27, TBD
- IEM Dallas 2025, May 19-25, Dallas, Texas, USA
- IEM Cologne 2025, Jul 23- Aug 3, Cologne, Germany
- ESL Pro League Season 22, Sep 23 – Oct 12, Europe
- IEM Chengdu 2025, Nov 3-9, Chengdu, China
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.
- The 2025 calendar will be packed with events
- Many teams will want to travel as little as possible to have time to rest and practice in between tournaments.
- Since most top teams are based in Europe, they will probably want to stay on the continent if they have the choice.
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.
- In 2025, the ESL Pro League will consist of 24 teams, instead of the previous 32, battling it out in a Swiss Tournament Format similar to the one used at the Majors.
- The only difference is that all matches at ESL Pro League will be carried out in a BO3 format, excluding the Grand Final, which will be a BO5.
- The Swiss Format has been widely criticized in the Counter-Strike community, with seeding and BO1s being the main issue.
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.