ESL Pro League Season 17: What's interesting about the play-off stage of the tournament

The final part of ESL Pro League Season 17 is about to begin. Of the 32 competitors, the top 16 teams remain in the competition. They will play in the playoffs to determine the winner, who in addition to the $200,000 prize pool will receive two slots to the prestigious LAN tournaments, Intel Extreme Masters Cologne 2023 and BLAST Premier: World Final 2023.

Differences of the current EPL Season 17 playoff format from previous seasons

The increase in the number of regular tournament participants from ESL from 24 teams to 32 led to the need to expand the format. In the group stage, this was reduced to the introduction of Triple Elimination.

The final phase of the championship has also seen a logical development. This is still a Single Elimination system, but this time, the teams ranked 3rd and 4th in their group will start at the Round of 16. In the previous seasons the play-offs started with Round of 12. All matches, except for the grand final, will be played as a bo3 series. And the ESL Pro League Season 17 champion will be decided by bo5 matches.

So in the battle in Round of 16 the following teams will start:

• Natus Vincere
• 00 Nations
• FURIA Esports
• Fnatic
• paiN Gaming
• Team Liquid
• G2 Esports
• Movistar Riders

The winners will advance to the Round of 12, where teams such as

• Outsiders
• FaZe Clan
• MOUZ
• ENCE

Group stage winners will go straight to the quarter finals:

• Heroic
• forZe
• Cloud9
• Team Vitality

NAVI have a long way to go to the triumph.

For Born to Win this tournament is not as easy as the players may have wished for. NAVI lost 1-2 to forZe in the first leg of the Group D top draw and then had to make their way through the middle draw.

There s1mple and team defeated Astralis with a score of 2-1, as well as Rare Atom with the same score. In the final round of the middle grid NAVI outplayed Team Spirit on two maps in a row, it should be noted that Spirit put the Ukrainian team in a very competitive struggle on the Anubis map, which ended one step from overtime. In Round of 16, their rival will be the 00 Nations club. It is also worth noting that with their performance in the group stage, Natus Vincere regained their place in the top 3 rankings from HLTV.

Top 5 players of the tournament at the end of the group stage

ESL has revealed the rankings of the players who have performed best in the group stage. Kaike 'KSCERATO' Cerato of FURIA Esports, Abai 'HObbit' Hasenov, Sergey 'Ax1Le' Rykhtorov, Dmitry 'sh1ro' Sokolov of Cloud9 and best of all the legendary French player Mathieu 'ZywOo' Herbaut. He finished with a rating of 1.61.

Maksym Shylov

Maksym has been working at EGamersWorld since 2017. Joining the company during his first year at university, he worked as a translator until 2022. After that, Maksym began working as an editor. His main discipline is Dota 2, and over time, Maksym's responsibilities expanded to include CS:GO, CS2 and Valorant. Additionally, as an editor, he publishes various materials on gaming topics.

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