Thursday, January 7th will see ELEAGUE's "Road to Las Vegas" event offer $50,000 to two battling teams and we have prepared a light preview for the event.

Turner Broadcasting and WME | IMG's venture into CS:GO will kick off Thursday as ELEAGUE will pair up with the broadcasting and production team of FACEIT to run a "Road to Las Vegas" tournament.

The two teams for the event, one from North America and one from Europe, are OpTic Gaming and CSGL and they qualified via heavily contested qualifiers that saw many namebrand favourites such as Cloud9, G2, Liquid, dignitas, and CLG drop out along the way.



CSGL return to the US for a redemption after RGN

The event itself is a single best-of-three with the winner raking in $35,000 and a spot at ELEAGUE's inaugural summer season (which itself will offer $1.2 million in prize money).

The loser will receive $15,000 in prize money.

The stream talent for the match will be:

Anders Blume - Caster

Auguste "Semmler" Massonnat

Daniel "ddk" Kapadia James "⁠BARDOLPH⁠" Bardolph - Host

Duncan "Thorin" Shields - Analyst

Richard Lewis - Analyst Janko "⁠YNk⁠" Paunović - Observer

Heather "⁠sapphiRe⁠" Garozzo - Observer

We have also prepared a brief overview of each team going into the Road to Las Vegas, which will start at 21:30 tomorrow in the United States.

OpTic Gaming

OpTic Gaming, who are as of now ranked 16th in the world per our team ranking, qualified for ELEAGUE's Road to Las Vegas tournament under the name and branding of a different organisation: Conquest.

However, the Canadian-American roster soon parted ways with their old organisation and were just recently signed by OpTic, an organisation with strong roots and history in the Call of Duty scene.

The team are actually a fairly new creation (with Conquest signing a Sponsorless lineup that had only formed a few weeks before in September 2015), although the players have all had experience in the past playing with each other (many of them were on Denial in 2014).



daps could help embolden his relatively young team with a win in Vegas

Before attending any events in 2015, the squad then made a single roster change, removing Ronnie "⁠ryx⁠" Bylicki and bringing on board Peter "⁠stanislaw⁠" Jarguz who had been playing for Coast at the time.

The change markedly improved the team's chemistry online and it was off the back of such repute that Shahzeb "⁠ShahZaM⁠" Khan and his team went into the CEVO-P Season 8 finals, the team's first offline event.

CEVO was a resounding success for the OpTic team (then still Conquest) as following an opener loss to Virtus.pro (including a grinding overtime loss on de_inferno), the team took down Liquid 2-0 and then surprised dignitas with a 2-1 win. They took mousesports to a close series in the semifinal, ultimately losing and finishing a respectable 3-4th place.



Eighteen-year-old NAF-FLY's strong rifling is a strong suit for the team

OpTic then arrived in Santa Ana for the iBUYPOWER Invitational, where their rivals in Las Vegas of CSGL were coincidentally at the venue but merely waiting out the weekend until the RGN Pro Series would kick off. OpTic were also planning to attend the RGN event but dropped out last minute due to scheduling issues with ESEA.

The iBUYPOWER run was a keenly felt disappointment for the team however, as William "⁠RUSH⁠" Wierzba and his teammates were mauled by Cloud9 16-4 on de_inferno and then taken out by compLexity 16-10 to leave the tournament early.

Online results kept clocking in however, and through such results OpTic were able to secure a prestigious qualification to the offline finals of ESL ESEA Pro League Season 2.

Much like the rest of the North American ensemble present, OpTic were humbled at EEPL, losing convincingly to fnatic 0-2 (both maps were whitewashes) and then losing 1-2 against Liquid where the latter team managed to get revenge for CEVO.

OpTic's track record so far has thus been a strong breakout event with two shaky follow-up attendances and with strong online performances throughout.

The team clearly seem determined to grow as a roster by having stuck together during the North American shuffle and will need to hone their interpersonal discipline if they wish to compete versus a strengthened CSGL outfit.

OpTic's five are:

CSGL

The saucily named CSGL, or CSGOLounge, or Lounge Gaming, are ranked 20th in the world and they are a collection of Polish players that are basically a reincarnation of the old Gamers2 lineup but with some added firepower in the form of Oskar "⁠oskarish⁠" Stenborowski.

The team have the distinction of having been signed into a more concrete existence as CSGL in September 2015, much as OpTic had been signed by their former Conquest organisation in the same month. If you like parallels, then this fact and that the two teams were both in the same building in November during the spree of American events, should practically make the Las Vegas meeting a matter of fate by now.

In any case, the original CSGL lineup featured Golden Five legend Mariusz "⁠Loord⁠" Cybulski, who has generally spent his 2015 vacillating between a player's and a coach's role on various Polish lineups.



MICHU failed to make a deep enough impact at RGN

This original lineup only had the distinction of winning the ESL Polish Championship in October over rivals Vexed before jetting off to California in November for a disastrous representation of Europe over at the RGN Pro Series Championship.

This stint included losing a close game to Liquid 13-16, then being defeated by the Brazilian underdogs of Games Academy 10-16, and finally only managing to defeat Kyle "⁠OCEAN⁠" O'Brien's SKDC 16-11 while not being able to advance from the group stage at that point.

Michał "⁠MICHU⁠" Müller also had the distinction of travelling up to San Jose that same weekend to stand-in for Virtus.pro at IEM, but that campaign was equally disastrous although for reasons likely unrelated to the nineteen-year-old star's act of standing-in alone.



Loord as coach may reap dividends for the chłopaki

Such a loss at a more regional North American event must have pained the Poles as they eventually parted ways with Loord, or rather, moved him into the role of coach and brought Mikołaj "⁠mouz⁠" Karolewski back on board, who had last played for this core in August 2015.

And thus a reforged Gamers2 team that is dangerous at any given time will be tested against the bastard child of North America in OpTiC, a team which has shown potential but has for now relapsed into the surly and begrudging posturing particular of that region.

CSGL's five are:

ELEAGUE's Road to Las Vegas taking place at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada will be streamed over at twitch.tv/faceittv at 21:30 , or 12:30 PM local time.

stich writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter