The Electronic Sports League, a major league in Europe, has just announced their brand new league tournament called the Core 2 Extreme Masters. This tournament spanning over 24 European countries strides to set new standards and borders in Gaming! The game disciplines will be two namely, Counter Strike and Warcraft 3.

The Prize Money pool for this event is a very impressive amount of € 160,000 (approximately $ 205,000). In addition to the Offline Lan Events at the various centres that have been chosen, the ESL will also hold Intel Friday Nights. These are one day tour events already enjoying a good publicity with lots of fans flocking to these events to watch the pro players battle it out.

Counter Strike Prize : Sharing a larger potion of the prize money, the Counter Strike leg will have € 110,000 to give out to it's winners. Games will be played in the 1.6 Version of the game.

Warcraft 3 Prize : This will be a solo 1v1 competition only. The game will use the most recent patch prior to the event and will boast a prize purse of €40,000 (about $51,000).

The Setup

As put up in their official announcement, ESL mentioned the participation criteria as followsAll countries with the ESL Pro Series will automatically qualify their winners to participate in the ESL Core 2 Masters Finals to be held early 2007. These countries that currently host the ESL Pro Series are Germany, Greece, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.

The best teams and players from these national leagues are directly invited to take part in the Core 2 Extreme Masters by ESL. In general, each participating country gets a certain amount of slots, depending on the relative strength of the country.In all countries without an ESL Pro Series, participants will be determined via national qualifiers.

48 slots will be distributed to the national qualifiers and ESL Pro Series, 12 of which allow for a guaranteed spot in the Core 2 Extreme Masters. The 36 remaining teams/players will play out another 12 slots in a two-round international qualifier. After all qualifiers, 24 teams/players are determined as participants of the first season of Core 2 Extreme Masters by ESL.

The kick off for this event takes place this August between 24th and 27th in the Games Convention Centre wherein all information regarding the event from the qualifiers, rules and participating teams will be published.