2013 DreamHack Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Championship
The 2013 DreamHack SteelSeries Counter Strike: Global Offensive Championship or simply DreamHack Winter 2013 was the first "" to be sponsored by Valve. The competition was held during the Winter 2013 DreamHack digital festival at the Elmia Exhibition and Convention Centre in Jönköping, Sweden. Six invitees joined ten qualifiers to form the sixteen team event. Community funding helped to build the US$250,000 prizepool. The tournament had a peak 145,000 concurrent viewers on twitch.tv and the in-game viewing client.
ESL Pro League Season 1
On April 28th, 2015, ESL announced a joint venture with ESEA to provide a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive league with $1,000,000 USD in total prize money in 2015. ESL invited twelve teams to each league to participate in its professional league. Each team would face off against every other team twice to play in twenty-two games throughout the eight week season. The top four teams from each continent would move on to the finals in Germany and would be automatically invited to the next season. Teams that placed fifth to ninth would not qualify for the finals, but would still be invited to Season 2. Teams that placed tenth and eleventh would have to play in a relegation phase, in which those teams and teams that placed second and third in ESEA Season 19's Premier League, the league under the Pro League, would face off to qualify for two spots in next season's Pro League. The team that placed first in the Premier League would qualify for Season 2. The team that placed twelfth in the Pro League would automatically be demoted to the Premier League.