IEM Sydney 2023 will be the first international Counter-Strike 2 tournament

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IEM Sydney 2023 will be the first international tournament that ESL will hold on the new version of CS: Counter-Strike 2. The event will take place from October 16 to 22 in Australia. 

The team list of IEM Sydney 2023 will include G2 Esports, Natus Vincere, Monte, FaZe Clan, Team Vitality, and other teams. Six squads received invitations as league partners. The organizers distributed four more quotas based on the ESL World Ranking. Five teams entered the tournament through regional qualifications in Europe, North America, Asia, and Oceania. Finally, the last participant was the Australian team Grayhound Gaming: this team was invited as a «Local Hero».

The last time Australia hosted a large-scale CS:GO tournament was before the coronavirus pandemic: IEM Sydney 2019 attracted almost 271.6K Peak Viewers, falling just short of the record result of 2018.

Most popular CS:GO tournaments in Sydney

Sydney hosted other CS:GO tournaments too, but they were much less popular than the IEM championships. For example, the GG.BET Sydney Invitational attracted only 30K Peak Viewers.

Talking about the most popular tournaments of the Intel Extreme Masters series, the leader in the number of viewers is IEM Rio Major 2022: it attracted more than 1.42M Peak Viewers. The top 5 tournaments in the series according to this indicator included last year’s championship in Cologne, as well as three IEM Katowice tournaments.

Most popular CS:GO tournaments of IEM series

IEM Sydney 2023 will be held at the Aware Super Theater, where 16 teams from around the world will compete for a prize pool of $250,000. You can follow the progress of the tournament on the report page. Broadcasts will be available on the official ESL channels on Twitch and YouTube.

The full release of the Counter-Strike 2 took place on September 27, although even before that the company distributed a lot of invites to test it.

Participants of IEM Sydney 2023: