Counter-Strike’s first-ever Brasilian major happens this November

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and ESL have announced that the game will have its first-ever Brasilian major tournament later this year, which will also be the first to be held in South America as a whole. This one was on the cards: an ESL One major was going to happen in Rio de Janeiro in 2020, but then the coronavirus pandemic got in the way.

ESL Rio 2022 (opens in new tab) qualifying will take place from October 31 2022, with the final stages taking place in the Jeunesse Arena (capacity: 15,430) over November 10-13. There’s good news also for fans who’d bought a ticket to the cancelled 2020 event and didn’t opt for a refund: their existing tickets are automatically still valid for the same days and categories of the tournament as whatever they originally bought.

Commentary inside the arena will be in Portuguese, while the livestream will be broadcast in English. I guess it’s time to find out what the Counter-Strike equivalent of “gooooooooooool!” is.

In terms of Covid policy, the official site says that “We will follow the local restrictions & regulations at the time of the event.” This is a bit of a holding statement but also realistic: we’re in a time where parts of the world are going in and out of mini-lockdowns, variant outbreaks have already occurred, and no-one knows what’ll be going on anywhere in six months.

The tickets are reasonably priced—you can get a four-day pass for around $78—and go on-sale in about two hours (opens in new tab). The overall prize pool for the event will be $1,000,000, with $500,000 of that set aside for the winning team.

This one is gonna be massive. Before the Rio major, however, there are still two other CS: GO majors to come this year: IEM Dallas (opens in new tab) takes place from 3rd-6th June, and IEM Cologne (opens in new tab) runs from 15-17th July.