ESL will retool their Intel Extreme Masters Fall event to be the final Regional Major Ranking (RMR) tournament of the year. All six regions will be covered in this event, spanning Europe, CIS, North & South America, Asia & Oceania.
IEM Fall will now occur as six individual tournaments, throughout the six regions, spanning between 29th September to October 10th. Unfortunately due to the pandemic still showing its might in many areas of the globe, only the Europe side is planned to be played over LAN, whilst the other 5 will remain an online tournament within their regions.
The dates for the tournaments are as follows;
- Europe: 29th September - 10th October
- North America: 5th October - 10th October
- South America: 29th September - 3rd October
- CIS: 29th September to 3rd October
- Asia: 5th October - 10th October
- Oceania: 29th September - 3rd October
Europe will see 24 teams, whilst North America & CIS will see 12. Meanwhile, South America, Asia & Oceania will each have 4 teams. All events see 50% splits between invited teams, and teams entering via closed qualifiers. Qualifying rounds will start towards the end of August and run until 10th September. Then two days later the closed qualifiers will be played until the 16th of the same month, and finally, a break of two weeks for the qualified teams before they'll need to brace themselves for all hell to break loose once again in the main competitions.
This announcement will mean that the majority of regions have just two RMR events to gain their total points collected, except the South America & CIS regions. This means a lot of teams will be sweating buckets and will be putting in plenty of practice as they have no option but to make sure they get high performances at this event if they want to have any chance of getting into the Major, to be hosted by PGL, later in the year. Some Major teams are hanging in the balance, including perennial favorites Virtus.pro & FaZe to name a few.
