This year Valve introduced a new system for
their CS:GO Majors that left a lot of fans,
and even some CS:GO pros confused.
With team categories like New and Fallen Legends,
it can sound more like a Halo tournament than
a CS:GO Major, so we're breaking down exactly
how the new tournaments work, and what it
takes to get an invite!
In Valve’s new structure, 24 teams get a
chance to play, and the Major is broken down
into three stages.
The first stage is called The New Challengers
Stage.
Formerly known as The Major Offline Qualifier,
this stage has 16 teams, who are the Minor’s
Champions and the Previous Major’s Fallen.
The Minor Champions are the top 2 teams from
each regional minor leading up to the current Major.
So, if your team placed first or second at
1 of these 4 Minor events, you wind up in
this category.
Additionally, the 2 top finishing third place
teams from those Minor events get the final
2 slots in the Minor Champions category, making
a grand total of 10 teams.
The other 6 teams are the bottom 6 teams from
LAST Major’s second stage, who automatically
qualify for this stage, and are called the
Previous Major’s Fallen.
Those teams all compete in the stage, and
the top 8 teams go on to the New Legends Stage,
with the bottom 8 teams getting eliminated
and having to qualify all over again to make
the next Major.
This stage is 5 matches, and they use the
Team Swiss System Format, which is basically
just a fancy way of saying a single loss doesn’t
eliminate you.
Matches 1 through 4 are just best-of-one matches,
but any teams still playing in round 5 will
need to win a best-of-three.
The goal here is to win 3 matches.
If you do, you’re in.
If you lose 3 rounds, you’re eliminated.
As soon as you get your 3 wins, you stop playing,
so it’s basically a race to win 3 matches.
Next up is what used to be the Group Stage,
which is now called The New Legends Stage.
This stage also has 16 teams and is broken
up into two categories.
The 8 teams who qualified from the New Challengers
Stage, who are called the New Challengers,
and the 8 best teams from the last Major,
called the current Legends, who automatically
qualified for the New Legends Stage, basically
getting a bye into the second round of the Major.
This round has exactly the same format as the
New Challengers Stage, with the goal being
to win 3 of the 5 rounds to move on to the
next stage.
These two groups of teams compete for 8 slots
in the final stage of the Major.
The top 8 teams move on to the final round,
and the teams who finished in the bottom 6
get qualified as the Previous Major’s Fallen,
having to start over from the New Challengers
Stage of the year’s next Major.
The final round, which used to be called the
Playoffs, is now called the New Champion’s
Stage, and is made up of the top 8 teams from
the New Legends stage.
These teams are known as the New Legends and
will compete to win the actual Major.
Since the stakes are higher, this stage uses
a single-elimination format, and every round
is a best of 3 the entire time, instead of
a best of 1 like most rounds of the stages
before them.
The New Champions Stage’s seeding is determined
based on a team’s overall score and the
strength of the teams they beat in previous
rounds.
The teams with the best records and the hardest
competition will get the best seeds and play
against the lower seeded teams who may have
had either less wins or lesser competition
on their road to the New Champion’s Stage.
After 3 elimination rounds, only 1 team will
remain undefeated, and they will be the winner
of the Major and get the biggest chunk of
that $1 million prize pool!
That winning team, along with the other 7
teams in this stage, will also qualify for
the next year's New Legends Stage without
having to play in the first stage or any regional minor.
And that’s how the new Major
system works for CS:GO.
Hopefully this video has given you a little
bit better of a grasp on how exactly the new
Major system works.
If you think we have left anything out, please
let us know in the comments below, and as
always, another video is on the way!
