PGL Masters Bucharest 2025 Preview
PGL Masters Bucharest 2025 kicks off on October 26.
The $1.25m studio LAN event will conclude on November 1, with the winning team taking home $400,000 of combined prize money.
PGL Masters Bucharest 2025
The event features a 16-team Swiss bracket leading into an eight-team, single-elimination bracket.
The event will also feature a third/fourth place playoff.
Opening matches:
Legacy vs Liquid
Pain vs Gentle Mates
GamerLegion vs FlyQuest
Heroic vs Ninjas in Pyjamas
3DMAX vs SAW
BetBoom vs MIBR
Aurora vs Fnatic
Astralis vs B8
Liquid faces a tough start in the competition against a Legacy riding high from their CS Asia Championship victory in Shanghai.
The Brazilian roster, however, did lose to Liquid on the way to the trophy.
Liquid are one week on in terms of integrating Jonathan ‘EliGE’ Jablonowski into the roster, so the event will be an interesting yardstick of their progress.
Elsewhere, Aurora will be reeling from their Thunderpick elimination at the hands of Furia. The Turkish team lost three of their five contests at Thunderpick in a bruising event, which underlined the roster’s need for a tournament victory.
PGL Masters Bucharest is by no means the biggest trophy in Counter-Strike, but for Aurora, the event may be a ‘now-or-never’ tournament for the roster. If they continue to fail, changes may be sought.
Aurora are one of two Top 10 VRS teams at the event, alongside 3DMAX. As such, the onus will be on both teams to perform.
For 3DMAX that means recovering quickly from their five-map Grand Final defeat at CAC to Legacy, and starting strong against SAW.
Astralis also face a tough start against Ukrainian young-guns, B8. Astralis have struggled since Martin ‘stavn’ Lund stepped away from the roster for medical reasons.
Since then, Astralis legend, Emil ‘Magisk’ Reif, has stood in for the roster, but the team is lacking firepower and openers, something B8 have in spades.
Big teams stay away from PGL Masters Bucharest
The story of PGL’s 2025 circuit has been one of struggle, specifically to attract the top names to its events.
Early discourse revolved around PGL’s lack of revenue share, with all of its prize pool going to ‘prize money,’ the vast majority of which is contractually awarded to players traditionally.
PGL eventually ceded, splitting its prize pool into player prize money and introducing ‘Club share’ as an incentive for organisations.
Yet the change hasn’t really borne the fruits that PGL may have hoped.
PGL Masters Bucharest features only two of the top 10 teams, a number beaten by the lower prize pool event of the Thunderpick World Championship, which had a $850,000 prize pool.
Instead, the top 10 have continued to embrace Blast and ESL events, especially with IEM Chengdu, starting November 3, the most stacked event before the beginning of the StarLadder Budapest Major 2025.
