IEM Rio Major 2022, Day 1: The Best Start in the History of CS:GO Majors

IEM Rio Major 2022 kicked off on October 31 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with a $1.25 million prize pool. The tournament began with the Challengers Stage, where 16 teams are competing for eight slots in the next Legends stage. Esports Charts tells about the results of Day 1 of the Major, the most popular games and teams, and compares the viewership statistics with the start of the previous Major, PGL Major Antwerp 2022.

IEM Rio Major 2022 Day 1 Results

The Challengers Stage participants played two bo1 matches each based on the results of the tournament's Day 1. MOUZ, GamerLegion, Bad News Eagles and Fnatic all started without a single loss and are now one win away from qualifying for the next stage of the Major. Teams that finished the day with two losses ended up one step away from leaving the tournament. That list includes 00 Nation, IHC Esports, Imperial Esports and, surprisingly, Cloud9 (HLTV.org's Top 5 in the world). It's worth mentioning that C9 lost both matches with a tight score of 17-19. The rest of the Challengers Stage ended the day with a 1-1 statistic.

Viewership Statistics

Tournament broadcasts totaled over 6.6 million Hours Watched and drew 457.3K Average Viewers. The event reached 745.3K PV at the Team Vitality vs. Imperial and Fnatic vs. Cloud9 matches which ran in parallel for some time. It should be noted that the encounter between the French team and the Brazilian team alone attracted more than 700.6K PV, becoming the most popular match of the day.

The most popular team of Day 1 of the Major is Imperial, the games of which were watched by 501K AV. Two other Brazilian teams, FURIA and 00Nation, round out the Top 3, while 9z and BIG round out the Top 5. At the same time, the Top 5 most popular matches by PV consists entirely of games with the participation of at least one Brazilian team.

The most popular language of broadcasts is English, which accounted for more than 43% of the IEM Rio Major 2022 Day 1 HW. The contribution of Portuguese-language broadcasts was more than 39% (2nd place), and Russian-language streams contributed a little more than 7% of the tournament's HW total for the day (3rd place). At the same time, the most popular broadcast channel by all metrics is Gaules — it accumulated more than 96% of Portuguese HW total. Second most popular channel is the main ESL channel, and SteamTV, the streaming service by Valve, rounds out the Top 3.

IEM Rio Major 2022 had a more successful start compared with PGL Major Antwerp 2022. The tournament's PV number grew 6.25%, while its AV number dropped 7.5%. At the same time, Day 1 of the current Major saw an 18.2% increase in HW, which was a result of an almost three-hour increase in Airtime. It should be noted that IEM Rio Major 2022 surpassed both the previous PGL Major Antwerp 2022 and all other Majors in terms of Challengers Stage PV.

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Despite IEM Rio Major 2022 having the best start in the history of CS:GO Majors, the tournament is not necessarily going to be the best in the discipline in terms of final statistics. We should remind you that the most popular CS:GO championships at the moment are PGL Major Stockholm 2021 and PGL Major Antwerp 2022. NAVI played in the Grand Finals of each of them, and each of them was watched by over 2 million PV.