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PGL Wallachia Season 1: Teams, Dates, Format, and More
We're only in the second quartar of the 2024 professional Dota 2 season, and we got some quality tournaments. Initially, Valve's discontinuation of DPC caused some raised eyebrows. Nevertheless, the third-party tournament organizers stepped up their game. Among them, ESL One takes the most dates out of the calendar with ESL Pro Tour Season 2. And now PGL has entered the competition.
PGL announced its commitment to host a marathon of tournaments between 2024-2026. Additionally, they plan to host three tournaments in 2024, featuring a million-dollar prize pool. The first tournament to officially kick off this marathon is PGL Wallachia, which will begin on May 10th.
PGL Wallachia Format
PGL Wallachia will feature a different tournament format. The group stage features one large group of sixteen teams. All the series played during the group stage will be best of three (Bo3). The group stage will be unique. It will feature a Swiss stage format, which pits winners against winners and losers against losers.
At the end of the group stages, the top eight teams will advance to the playoffs. The bottom eight teams will get eliminated.
The playoffs feature a double-elimination bracket. All the matches played during the playoffs will be best-of-three (Bo3) with a best-of-five (Bo5) finals.
In the first round of the playoffs, the eight teams will go up against each other. The winner of the series will advance to the upper bracket, while the loser will go to the lower bracket. This method, however, would not feature lengthy tiebreakers. Additionally, it's a tad similar to the recent method used at The International 2023.
The Teams for PGL Wallachia
A total of sixteen teams will be partaking at PGL Wallachia Season 1. Among those sixteen teams, ten received a direct invite to the tournament.
The ten invited teams are:
Team Liquid
Gaimin Gladiators
Team Secret
Team Falcons
BetBoom Team
Team Spirit
Xtreme Gaming
Aurora
Shopify Rebellion
Heroic
The remaining six teams qualified for the tournament through the single slot given to their region during the PGL Wallachia Season 1 qualifiers. The six teams that found their way through the qualifiers are:
Western Europe
Tundra Esports
Eastern Europe
Virtus Pro
China
G2xiG
Southeast Asia
Blacklist International
North America
Nouns
South America
BOOM Esports
Location & Date
PGL announced that they will be hosting PGL Wallachia Season 1 in Bucharest, Romania. This location was also once used as a place for The Internationals 2021. The tournament will start on May 10th. It will last 9 days and end on May 19th.
Prize Pool Distribution
At the time of writing, PGL has not officially disclosed the prize pool distribution for the tournament. However, in this type of tier 1 tournament, the winning team takes home around 30-50% of the total prize pool. The tournament could also give out points, which would come into play for the tournaments hosted by PGL.
Featured Image Source: PGL
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