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ESL Pro Tour to Include Dota 2 With $15 Million Riyadh Masters Tournament

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ESL Pro Tour to Include Dota 2 With $15 Million Riyadh Masters Tournament

The new line of tournaments will inject new life into what was touted by many to be a fading pro scene.

After the success of its CSGO tournaments, the ESL Faceit Group is expanding to Dota 2. The company has announced a series of Dota2 events dubbed the ESL Pro Tour (EPT) with a total prize pool of $17 million. 

The inaugural tournament will be held between April 9 and 23 under ESL’s DreamLeague Season 19 campaign. The second tournament will begin less than two months after the final of the first one, will be called DreamLeague Season 20, and will run from June 11 to 25. Both tournaments will feature 16 teams and have $1,000,000 each in prize money. 

The showpiece event of the first ESL Pro Tour Season will be the Riyadh Masters 2023. Dream League Season 19 and 20 champions will join 18 other teams in the Saudi Arabian capital to fight for the Riyadh Masters crown from July 17th-30th. The competition’s prize pool will be a whopping $15 million. 

EPT’s Season one will not overlap with Valve’s Dota Pro Circuit calendar. ESL will raise the curtain on the DreamLeague Season 19 almost a week after DPC’s tour 2 comes to an end, while DreamLeague Season 20 will take place after Tour 3. The gap in May will allow gamers to participate in the Dota 2 Berlin Major. As a result, the introduction of the ESL Pro Tour will expand the professional Dota 2 scene as a whole. 

New DreamLeague Seasons

Sixteen teams will battle it out in DreamLeague Season 19, with 8 teams remaining in the competition after the initial group phase. The number of total contestants will be trimmed down to four after the second group stage. The remaining sides will compete in the playoffs and the champion will get the ticket to Riyadh. 

DreamLeague Season 20 will follow a similar format. However, two teams will directly qualify for the Riyadh Masters from the competition instead of one.

Additionally, the five best performers at these tournaments, which will most likely be determined by averaging placements, will also move on to the Saudi Arabian tournament.

Riyadh Masters 2023

The Riyadh Masters will be held during the Gamers8 festival in Saudi Arabia. The tournament will begin with a play-ins stage. Twelve teams will feature in the play-ins and eight of them will join the other eight in the group stages. After the group stage finishes, 12 teams will advance to the playoffs. 

ESL is yet to finalize the list of invitees. During these tournaments, you can enjoy the ESL Pro Tour matches live on ESL’s YouTube and Twitch streams. 

The ESL Pro Tour will be a big step forward for the Dota 2 eSports industry. ESL is committed to investing enormous amounts of money to revive Dota 2 and reinstate it as the biggest thing in the global eSports scene. If you're a fan of the game, you'd better buckle up for tons of Dota 2 action this year. 

 

ESL Pro Tour to Include Dota 2 With $15 Million Riyadh Masters Tournament
The Old One
When he's not sighing at sub-standard teammates in Dota 2 and CS2, The Old One is writing about those two games (among other things). If you see his name around the site too many times for your liking, well, the guy just never stops writing. Yes, we've tried an intervention.