Party Astronauts forced out of IEM Rio NA Closed Qualifier by ESL

Party Astronauts have confirmed today that they have been forced to pull out of the IEM Rio NA Closed Qualifier by ESL, who had previously determined that teams are only allowed to compete in either the IEM Rio NA Qualifier or the ESL Challenger Atlanta Closed Qualifier. The fairly baffling decision by ESL previously saw NRG have to pull out of the Rio Closed Qualifier despite winning the first Open Qualifier back on August 15th.

ESL's mandate that the two closed qualifiers must have mutually exclusive teams seems to stem from the fact that IEM Rio 2024 is set to start the day after ESL Challenger Atlanta. If a team qualifies for both events, it would be almost certainly impossible for them to attend both.

Typically, tournament organizers resolve this issue by inviting the runner-up from a qualifier if the winner cannot attend the event. However, ESL has seemingly chosen to ensure they would not have to take this step by making NRG and Party Astronauts choose which event they want to try and qualify for.

While this decision undoubtedly simplifies the amount of work ESL's tournament administration needs to do, it also effectively saps opportunities away from the most worthy teams in the region, the ones who bested local opposition to top the open qualifiers. In North America, where teams have few opportunities to compete internationally, punishing a team for creating extra work because they were too successful is a flawed approach at best.

Legacy, a Brazilian team, also claimed one of the NA Closed Qualifier invites despite the team's last NA series being on June 16th — 65 days ago, taking another spot away from the best teams actively competing in the region. Fortunately for ESL, they likely saw this potential issue coming yesterday as they ran a third-place decider for the second IEM Rio Open Qualifier, likely expecting that Party Astronauts would come out on top of their matches versus InControl and FLUFFY AIMERS.

As such, FLUFFY AIMERS have claimed the final spot in IEM Rio NA Closed Qualifier, joining Liquid, Legacy, and LAG in the mix.

With NRG and PA making their decisions, the team lists for the IEM Rio and ESL Challenger Atlanta NA Closed Qualifiers are now:

Rio

Atlanta