The next competition we’ll be looking forward to is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or CS:GO for short. Counter-Strike has long been one of the most important competitions on DreamHack, up until StarCraft II and the several Moba games that are being played became popular. Counter-Strike stems from the year 2000, even before Windows XP officially launched. For years there was a call to stop supporting the Counter-Strike game and with the release of CS:GO the 1.6 version of the game has finally been laid to rest. The CS:GO competition at DreamHack is one of the first of it’s kind and mostly features invited teams we all know from the 1.6 past. With 300.000 SEK on the line it will be one of the bigger tournaments this years, and the jumpstart of a new e-sports scene, continuing the tradition of Counter-Strike as a highly competitive e-sports game.

The Teams

The first team we will take a look at is NiP-Gaming. Ninjas in Pyjamas is one of the best teams at the moment, winning DreamHack Valencia and ESWC 2012 in the last couple of months. This DreamHack Winter, Ninjas in Pyjamas will join the tournament as huge favorites. Will they be able to win another major tournament?

The current DreamHack champion, Fnatic, is also competing at DreamHack Winter 2012. Fnatic hasn’t been playing a lot of CS:GO but they will certainly try their best. They are still underdogs, but they have a very talented team.

Next to NiP-Gaming, Team VeryGames is a clear favorite for the DreamHack Winter title. With starplayers RpK and kennyS, VeryGames is a brilliant team that is looking to impress friend and foe at the world’s biggest lanparty.

Team Curse will be the last major team that we are covering. Curse is an interesting team, since most of the teammembers have a Call of Duty background at team hold mouse1. Team Curse recently got invited to the ESEA Invite Season 12, that finishes a couple of days before the big DreamHack Winter tournament. The switch from Call of Duty to CS:GO shook up a lot people, but Curse is already performing really well on the highest level of play.

The Tournament

In total there will be 16 teams fighting each other for that #1 spot on DreamHack. There are 10 invited teams, 4 teams will be determined by online qualifiers and finally there will be two winners from the BYOC at DreamHack Winter itself. This all comes together in a 5on5 Group Play BO1 tournament in which the 8 best teams will go on to the Single Elimination Play Off BO3 section of the tournament . The Grand Final is eventually played on Saturday the 24th of November.

This game will be big and there will be a lot of enthusiasm for it. We are seeing it already in the choices that have been made for the casters for this game. Names like Paul ‘Redeye’ Chaloner and Patrick ‘cArn’ Sattermon around the least and will bring some of the world best casters and experts to provide coverage of the tournament. If CS:GO can match itselfs against the number of viewers that League of Legends and StarCraft II get remains to be seen, but note that DreamHack is taking this tournament very seriously.

You can see this also with the prize money that has been announced. A total of 300.000 SEK (~ 35.000 Euro) has been promised for the tournament, with the winner taking 150.000SEK. The runner-up will receive 80K and the numbers 3 & 4 will both receive 35K. A massive prize purse which confirms that CS:GO is the replacement for CS1.6. We at Intel Pack4DreamHack are curious to see whom will take the first big prize of 2012.