FACEIT has announced a brand new format for Season Seven of their CS:GO tournament, the Esports Championship Series (ECS).
The ECS regular season will then run from March 11th to May 9th and will consist of five eight-team elimination tournaments.
The season will be broken up into four phases starting with the ECS Open Qualifiers. Beginning February 16th, teams will be able to sign up for single elimination tournaments.
Each of the top eight teams from NA and EU will then progress to the Challenger Cup where they will face eight invited teams from ECS Season 6. Teams will fight it out in a best-of-three Swiss format tournament from March 5th-7th to determine their Challenger Cup rankings. These rankings will be used to determine who fills the open slots in the ECS regular season brackets.
The ECS Season 6 invited teams from each region are:
NA
- Complexity
- Cloud9
- eUnited
- MIBR
- NRG
- Renegades
- Rogue
- Team Liquid
EU
- Astralis
- Faze
- Fnatic
- LDLC
- Mousesports
- Ninjas in Pyjamas
- North
- Optic
The ECS regular season will then run from March 11th to May 9th and will consist of five eight-team elimination tournaments. Every tournament will have a $25,000 prize pool up for grabs in each region. Each regular season tournament will be filled by the invited teams from ECS Season 6 available for that week, with the empty slots being occupied by the Challenger Cup teams based on their rankings.
The winners of the first three tournaments from each region will qualify automatically for the ECS Season 7 Finals. The remaining two slots will be given to the top earning teams from each region in prize pool across the whole regular season. Teams already qualified will not be counted.
Once a team has qualified for the finals, they can choose not to further participate in the regular season, opening up an extra slot for a Challenger Cup side. The teams coming from ECS Season 6 may also decide against participating in certain tournaments in case of a conflicting schedule with other competitions.
“We have worked extremely hard to determine a format and match timings that suit the players, the community and that help the CS:GO ecosystem,” said FACEIT co-founder and Chief Business Officer (CBO) Michele Attisani
The eight qualifying teams will then battle it out at The ECS Season 7 Grand Finals at The SSE Arena, Wembley in London from 6th – 9th June.
