Last year, the World Championships took place at a number of venues across Europe over four weeks and ended when Korean aces SK Telecom T1 were named as the winners of the tournament for the second time in three years.
The Korean stalwarts are the only team to have won the coveted title twice since it was first contested almost six years ago now. The first winners being Fnatic who were followed by Taipei Assassins, before SK Telecom T1’s two wins sandwiched a sole win by Samsung Galaxy White in Season 4.
LoL 2016 Worlds – teams and venues
The 2016 event starts on the 29th September with the Group Stage contest taking place in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.
A fortnight later, the action heads to The Chicago Theatre in Illinois for the Quarter Finals, before the Semi Finals are contested from the 21st October at Madison Square Garden in New York.
The final is then contested on the 29th October at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.
After the conclusion of fixtures last week, the remaining places in the World Championships have now all been decided and teams will excitedly be making their plans to head on over to San Francisco at the end of September for the start of the Group Stage.
The 16 qualifying teams, seeded as per their qualification position in each region are as follows:
- Team SoloMid (North America – 1st seed)
- Counter Logic Gaming (North America – 2nd seed)
- Cloud9 (North America – 3rd seed)
- G2 Esports (Europe – 1st seed)
- H2K (Europe – 2nd seed)
- Splyce (Europe – 3rd seed)
- ROX Tigers (Korea – 1st seed)
- SK Telecom T1 (Korea – 2nd seed)
- Samsung Galaxy (Korea – 3rd seed)
- Edward Gaming (China – 1st seed)
- Royal Never Give Up (China – 2nd seed)
- I May (China – 3rd seed)
- Flash Wolves – (Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan – 1st seed)
- Ahq e-Sports Club (Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan – 2nd seed)
- INTZ e-Sports (Brazil – qualifier)
- Albus NoX Luna (Russian – qualifier)
Before that however, there will be a Worlds Group Draw Show taking place on Sept. 10 at 11 a.m. PST, which will see the teams placed into pots based on their seeding and geographic locations and then they will be drawn into one of the four groups for the Group Stage.
There has already been plenty of speculation on the esports betting markets as to which team will be the one to earn the 2016 World Championship crown.
The esports bookmakers have the two top Korean teams SK Telecom T1 and ROX Tigers as the joint 7/4 favourites at the time of writing with Chinese team Edward Gaming a 5/1 shot and the third Korean team Samsung Galaxy a 10/1 shot.
Unsurprisingly, the two qualifiers from Brazil and Russia are the two rank outsiders with INTZ and Albus both ranked as 2000/1 outsiders to take the title.
It promises to be a huge event.
With $1,000,000 up for grabs for the winner and $250,000 for the runner up, plus a minimum of $25,000 for the teams that get through to the Championships, it is also one of the most lucrative League of Legends events of the year.
[show-table name=cta-alphadraft region=US] [show-table name=cta-bet365 region=ROW]Counter Strike ESL Pro League at the midway point
Next week we reach Week Five of the nine week Group Stage of the CS:GO ESL Pro League Season IV with our focus turned on the qualifying competitions taking place in Europe and North America.
The second half of the season sees a large proportion of the matches taking place over Week Five – and especially Week Six – after which the tables should have a much more clear look.
At the moment with some teams having played a large amount of games, and some playing just a few, the tables are somewhat out of kilter.
In Europe, currently it is Faze Clan (10-4) that lead the table ahead of Ninjas in Pyjamas (9-3). These two teams are some way ahead of the rest, although third place team Natus Vincere (6-0) are yet to lose a game in the six they have played.
Other teams with records that could still challenge that top spot include Team EnVyUs (5-3), Fnatic (4-2), or even Team Dignitas (4-4). However it does look a forlorn hope for Flipsid3 Tactics, who have lost all eight of their contests thus far.
The North American qualifying section is a little more clear-cut with the unbeaten Cloud9 topping the group with a perfect 14-0 record, although one other team, Echo Fox, also boasts an unbeaten record at 6-0.
Immortals (10-4) are second in the table. In truth, these three teams seem to be the quality teams in the section with no other team boasting a better than 0.5 winning record. And unlike the Europe section, at least all teams in this group have won at least one match up.
Over the next few weeks, there will be a huge number of ESL Pro League games that Counter Strike: Global Offensive fans can bet on at bookmakers like Bet365 Esports.
With matches in both Europe and the US covered, there are going to be a wealth of great esports betting opportunities on this popular event.
