The National University eSports League (NUEL) has initiated its first season for CS:GO. For those that haven’t heard of NUEL before, it’s an eSport league for those in Universities (heh) that started out running leagues for LoL and later Hearthstone, getting support from ESL UK along the way and running their first LAN (NUEL Live) earlier this year. This NUEL CS:GO league incorporates the former British University Counterstrike League, which ran a tournament over the summer featuring a few teams finishing with Loughborough University winning.

The league is in full swing, beginning on the 11th after two weeks of qualifiers, and currently features the 32 teams who managed to battle their way from the original 64 who had signed up. The league works in an interesting format. It has the top upper bracket, the normal league, where teams battle through to the highest echelons of the tournament. Then, after the teams are knocked out, they move into a lower bracket, or “S-League”, where the eliminated sides then play against each other to set their final finishing position, between 7th and 64th, so that no team is truly eliminated straight away from the entire NUEL season.

When talking to the Tournaments Lead, Chris “Hench” Henshaw, he gave me a quick run-down of how the tournament fully works and how they want their first CS:GO tournament to run. I was told that this is a test tournament, as they want to run a “good one with a small number of teams before going huge”. As CS:GO was always wanted, lots of demand existed for a tournament like this, they wanted to get it right before opening it to many more. The ideal plan for them is to then start another championship in Spring, where it would be a larger tournament with them thinking of picking up dedicated servers. It was also mentioned that they’re not sure about how big CS:GO will be for them, but there is “potential for a live event”.

The layout of the tournament is simple. The first two weeks of the tournament were qualifiers, which were held on Wednesdays (28th Oct and 4th Nov) and were Bo1 games. The teams started off in either the top or bottom half of the group, you win you go up (or stay where you are) and if you lose you move down. After four games, the positions were decided and who would be in the upper bracket and the S-League. The Upper Bracket will be a double-elimination Best-of-Three format right until the end, which will feature a Best-of-Five final. The S-League (or Step League) is where the teams will fall into once eliminated. This league is where you play everyone and until you move into a position in it. It features two best-of-ones a week, and it’s essentially a infinite extending consolidation bracket.

Do tune in to see the best our Universities have to offer, and any potential up and coming UK CS players that haven’t been seen yet. It gets streamed on their twitch channels thenuel and thenuel2.

Tournament (including teams taking part) can be found here – http://thenuel.com/season/csgo-winter-championship