A look at the online CS:GO leagues and qualifiers and how the companies running them are oversaturating the market.

Photo Credit: (ESL Helena Kristiansson)

38 official matches in 18 days. That’s how many times G2’s Counter-Strike team played from October 4th to October 22nd. G2 are taking part in both ECS Season 6 and ESL Pro League Season 8, which are online Counter-Strike leagues that have most of the best teams in ﻿﻿the world taking part for a chance to go to the finals on LAN, and have only taken a small break from the online action to travel across the world to play in cs_summit 3 in California.

G2 are struggling and looking at their schedule you can quickly see one reason why. They have a packed online schedule that leaves little to no free days to fix their issues. On the 16th of October G2 started off the day facing LDLC in the GG.BET IEM Chicago Qualifier where they lost 2-0. Then they had to face Windigo in ESL the same afternoon. They won Dust II 16-14 in a back-and-forth affair but stumbled badly on Overpass falling to Windigo 16-3. This would have been a great time to take a look at the four maps they played that day and go over what went wrong and what they did well. They didn’t get that luxury. Next up was two maps against the very best in the world, Astralis, for ECS that very same night. They lost both, unsurprisingly.

﻿﻿That’s just the story for G2, a Tier 1 team in terms of status, if not on the server as well. Teams that aren’t even in ESL Pro League still have MDL or ECS matches as they try to get promoted to ESL Pro League or find a way to get top four to even get a chance on LAN for ECS. OpTic Gaming has had so many matches rescheduled in MDL that before they head off to Summit they must play four matches in four hours on October 28th to try to get caught up as they fight for promotion to ESL Pro League. OpTic’s coach, Ruggah, put it best on T﻿witter:

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