ESL has made changes to the qualifying process for the EPT Championships

Tournament operator ESL has announced changes to the qualification process for the ESL Pro Tour championships: Intel Extreme Masters Katowice and Cologne. Starting with Intel Extreme Masters: Katowice 2023, the organizers will no longer award points to the ESL Pro Tour table. The structure will be adapted to invite other EPT champions and according to the ESL rankings.

The upcoming EPT Series Championship, IEM Cologne 2022, will reportedly be the last event with the current structure.

The updated structure of the EPT series events will look like this:

The tournament operator also emphasized that they are currently in the process of rebuilding the ESL World Rankings, taking into account additional challenges arising from the current structure, as well as changes planned for next year.

According to the ESL, these changes were made to further simplify the ESL Pro Tour scheme due to the belief that the current system of two separate rankings had led to confusion.

ESL added that it intends to work with other tournament operators to invite only the best teams to their championships. In addition, the operator did not begin to make changes to the ESL Challenger, ESL Challenger League and ESL National Championships. Winning these tournaments still earns you a qualifying slot for the ESL Pro League Conference.

The tournament operator stated that in the event that a team wins multiple qualifiers, the remaining spots will also be awarded based on the ESL rankings and will not go to the silver medalists of those championships.