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(Image: ESL)

IEM Katowice is one of the biggest esports events in the world. Spread over two weeks the best teams in a number of esports head to Poland to compete for millions of dollars.

The 2018 iteration of the Katowice event featured a $1 million Dota 2 tournament, a $500,000 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament, a $250,000 StarCraft II tournament, a $100,000 Heroes of the Storm tournament, a $50,000 Player Unknown's Battlegrounds tournament and many more smaller competitions.

This is the sixth year the Intel Extreme Masters has visited Katowice, making its home in the iconic Spodek arena that dominates the city skyline.

Since the first year the event has grown massively and is now the event that almost every esports fan wants to attend.

Thousands of people pack out the arena, while thousands more roam the expo halls, watch the smaller competitions and work on the event.

But this now iconic event required a strange turn of events to even get started.

Not many people in the world, outside of Poland at least, have heard of the city of Katowice. The relatively small mining town is now home to a massive esports event, which seems like a very strange fit.

“Intel Extreme Masters used to go to the major cities with big international names; New York, Singapore, Taipei, Shanghai,” says Michal “CARMAC” Blicharz, Vice President of Pro Gaming for ESL and the face of IEM.

“Suddenly, Katowice popped up on the map, which nobody's ever heard of outside of Poland, and why is that?”

“That is because one of the council men on the city hall in Katowice is young, open-minded, and intelligent,” adds Blicharz.

“He happened to, just purely by accident, read an interview with me about IEM, and looked me up on Facebook. Turns out, we have friends in common because, you know, Poland, for a 40-million country, apparently is not that large.

"So, he messaged me on Facebook, and fast forward a couple of months. I was together with people from ESL Poland, with the Mayor in the room, talking about what we can do, and how we would do it.”

This conversation lead to the start of IEM Katowice, and in the years that followed it grew and grew.

However, that first year was very nerve-racking for everyone involved. Back in 2013 esports events in arenas of this size didn’t really exist and no one really knew if it would work out, or if it would be a total failure.

“We were actually quite scared of it at the beginning because we had never had more than 900 seats in front of a stage before, let alone thousands of seats,” recalls Blicharz.

“So, for that reason, we scouted the venue and looked at seats and I said, if there's gonna be two-and-a-half thousand people it might look empty. What will the sponsors say?

"So we came up with this idea of a premium model, where anybody can enter for free, but if you buy a ticket, you come in earlier and you get a space assigned.”

“Anyway, I go out on stage one hour before the opening ceremony. And I look up on stage, and I look all the way up to the nosebleeds, and the place is completely packed. Entirely packed, including people sitting on the stairs as much as security would allow it.”

That first event turned out to be a massive success and resulted in IEM Katowice retuning the next year. ESL improved the event further and eventually turned it into the biggest esports event in the world.

Now with the 2018 version of IEM about to kick off the pressure is on to improve upon last year’s event. But based on everything we have seen so far out here in Poland that looks almost certain to happen.