ESL announces ESL Challenger Melbourne

Fans will once again need to stay up late into all hours of the night later this April in order to watch ESL Challenger Melbourne. The event will be the first Challenger event of the calendar year and is slated to begin during ESL Pro League 19, impacting which teams can play. With M80, Complexity, BOSS, and Liquid in the EPL, it remains to be seen who, if any, of these teams will be able to attend the event.

Complexity traveled to Melbourne last year for the 2023 edition of the event alongside Evil Geniuses Black, only to be eliminated in groups.

The eight-team event will see two teams from Oceania, one from Asia, one from North America, one from Europe, and three global invites due to their ESL World Ranking travel to the Garden City.

North American Open qualifiers for the $100,000 event begin February 15th with the Closed Qualifier starting on the 19th. You can sign up for the qualifier here.

With the qualifier happening so soon, it means that teams currently away on bootcamps for the upcoming PGL Major Copenhagen Americas RMR will likely not enter. Nouns, Wildcard, Liquid, and Complexity are all in Europe this week practicing while M80 is just returning from the old continent.

The slot distribution is as follows: