ESL confirmed that IEM Cologne 2021 will be a face-to-face event. Moreover, this will be the first Counter-Strike tournament to be a LAN event, since the coronavirus pandemic began.
Unfortunately, there won’t be any spectators in IEM Cologne 2021. This situation was stated in the revised tournament calendar published by the ESL in April. According to the new roadmap, the ESL’s first face-to-face event with an audience will be the IEM Winter. IEM Winter event will held in Asia from December 2nd to 12th. Michal “Carmac” Blicharz, vice president of professional gaming at ESL, said on Twitter on Friday that “we will be in touch with the community in the coming days to explain better what to expect and how it’s all coming together”.
Counter-Strike fans will be happy with the return of face-to-face events after more than a year of mostly online action. The last major CS:GO LAN tournament was IEM Katowice 2020. In that tournament, the playoffs had to played behind closed doors due to the coronavirus pandemic.
IEM Cologne 2021 will start with the Play-In stage, a two-day qualifier with the participation of 16 teams. The top eight teams in this double qualifying group will continue to the main tournament. Moreover, these teams will join the top eight teams on the ESL Pro Tour (Road to Cologne) leaderboard. The glitzy tournament will be from July 6th to 18th. In addition, it will have the top 24 teams in the world with an offer of $1 million.
Here is the team list for the IEM Cologne Play-In is:
These eight teams have already take their place in the main stage:
IEM Cologne, which was rebranded under the old ESL One Cologne name in April following a new partnership agreement between ESL and Intel, will be counted as a Masters Championship event in Intel Grand Slam Season 3. Gambit, Natus Vincere, and Astralis currently lead the $1 million prize race with two wins each. Heroic and mousesports follow these teams with one victory.
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