It's here, and it's happening soon!
The PGL Major will kick off on the 9th May with the Contenders stage, the initial matches of which have been announced and are detailed below. However, the low-down is the Contenders stage will be a 4 day event with group stages, the first eight teams to get 3 wins will go forward, whereas the other eight will have come all this way, for it to simply blow up in their faces and they'll go home with nothing, with just a "good luck for the next major" note. Some teams will storm straight to a 3 - 0 win line, whereas others will be much closer to going home and will scrape through on a 3 - 2 line. Either way, as long as they get to that 3 wins, they're in!
The teams hoping for a piece of the Major in the Contenders stage are 9z, Imperial, forZe, IHC, Renegades, Spirit, Vitality, Liquid, ENCE, G2, Astralis, Outsiders, Complexity, Eternal Fire, Bad News Eagles & MIBR. Early group stages will be a best-of-one, with all elimination & qualification matches being best of three, so at least early on there are huge scopes for sudden disaster. With that however, here are the first set of matches;
All times are UTC/GMT, and all of these matches are occurring on Monday 5th May;
- 11:00 - Vitality vs Complexity
- 11:00 - Eternal Fire vs Bad News Eagles
- 12:15 - Liquid vs G2
- 12:15 - forZe vs Renegades
- 13:30 - Astralis vs IHC
- 13:30 - Spirit vs Imperial
- 14:45 - MIBR vs Outsiders
- 14:45 - ENCE vs 9z
All of the above will be the BO1 early matches, and upon completion there will be another match for all teams forming the Swiss Round Stage 2, these will be another set of BO1s, and then on Tuesday 10th May, we jump to teams who will face another BO1, or if they've got themselves to 2 wins or 2 losses by that point already, will face their first and perhaps only Best of 3 decider, and there are no lower brackets here, so no second chances to be had.
Also worthy of note, the Viewers Pass & Tokens are available for sale in-game, as well as team stickers & player autograph stickers. If you buy the pass, you can also take part in this Major's Pick 'Em Challenge, and guess the teams going through each stages in return for extra tokens to later buy Souvenir Cases with.