TBS’s big televised Counter-Strike tournament is coming back for a second season!
TBS has advertised that the second season of ELEAGUE will be kicking off with preliminaries starting September 7. Turner and eSports talent agency WME-IMG plan to feature the top Counter-Strike teams in a broadcast on the TBS cable channel at 10 p.m. on Friday nights. As with the first season, fans can watch the action being live streamed on Twitch as well.
After the preliminaries, ELEAGUE will begin the four-week group stage of the second season on October 21. All of this will end with the quarterfinals on November 29 that lead into the semifinals and grand finals on December 2 and December 3.
ELEAGUE general manager Christina Alejandre said the following about the way ELEAGUE has been going so far:
“We’ve been very pleased with the performance of ELEAGUE and the significant levels of engagement with our content across all platforms in our first season. In our second season, we’ve enhanced the schedule to make the stakes even higher from a competitive standpoint, while also creating an opportunity for a more open field.”
Alejandre says that the second season of ELEAGUE will keep audiences more engaged through its three months. The live television ratings for the first season only averaged 271,000 viewers on TBS, While the tournament’s Twitch stream attracted a much larger audience.
The first season of TBS’s tournament saw the Polish team Virtus.Pro come out on top and win the first place $400,000 portion of the $1,400,000 total prize pool. Besides being the first CS:GO tournament to be televised, the tournament is also famous for being the first million dollar tournament in CS:GO history. The second season aims to have the top 8 teams from season 1 (Astralis, Cloud9, EnVyUs, Fnatic, mousesports, Natus Vincere, Ninjas in Pyjamas, and Virtus.Pro), along with eight more teams from both EU and NA qualifiers.
