Hopefully everyone made the most of their player break, as the next heap of professional Counter-Strike is already coming flying in, threatening to fill everyone’s schedules trying to find every morsel of professional CS to partake in.
The most recently announced is the CS Summit 7, that the team Beyond the Summit have taken the liberty of drawing a comparison to MI6’s iconic legend, 007, in the announcement.
We have roughly two weeks to prepare for more Summit goodness that typically involves a more casual format compared to the more serious (and admittedly prestigious) tourneys seen within Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. More casual might be an understatement: the hosts typically lounge about on couches while speaking plainly to participants that have just left the server about the ups and downs of their play.
Socks are seen consistently.
Granted, with the pandemic, precisely what anyone should be expecting from the upcoming tourney that begins on January 25 is up in the air: HLTV stated that they have the understanding that the tournament will be held in Europe, but no one knows what teams are currently involved in the tournament.
North American teams could still participate, however, as Liquid, FURIA, and Evil Geniuses are all scheduled to be in Europe for the BLAST Premier Global Finals starting on January 19, and running through the 24th of January.
The prize pool has been announced as $200,000 which the winner will take the lion’s share of, but precisely what teams could be showing up is currently not clear, nor the format of the tournament itself.
The best of 3 standard could well be presumed at least from the quarter-finals onwards to culminate in a best of five, but until the team at Beyond the Summit clarifies as to precisely what fans should expect, it’s all guesswork and speculation based on general standards and precisely who could be in that region.
An interesting aspect for consideration is the Beyond the Summit is an LA-based organization that is hosting the event within Europe; speculation has been offered that this is due to attempts at LAN play, much as other tournament organizers have attempted (and ultimately failed, at least not without spreading COVID-19) in the past year.
If there is a chance for offline play, the upcoming BtS event could be monumental if done safely and intelligently: it’s difficult to argue that the professional scene of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive hasn’t suffered as other esports with the turn to online play which brings about latency and disconnect issues consistently, regardless of title competed within.
