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WePlay Esports, a prominent Ukrainian based esports events organizer, broadcaster and content provider, have just recently announced one of the next iterations of their line of CS: GO tournaments, titled WePlay Academy League Season 2.
The first part of the online tournament features eight Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams from one of the strongest multigaming esports organizations in the world.
Participants and rules
The full list of CS: GO teams, invited to the tournaments’ main event, includes rosters of the famous esports organizations, such as Denmark-based Astralis Talent, BIG Academy team from Germany, United Kingdom‘s Fnatic Rising CS: GO roster, and FURIA Academy from Brazil.
Thiese academy teams will be also joined by the German’s mouz NXT roster of players from EU, Ukraine-based Natus Vincere Junior squad from CIS region, also Sweden‘s Young Ninjas and VP.Prodigy CS teams from Russia.
The first part of the CS: GO event, the online stage of the WePlay Academy League Season 2, starts on September 28. The tournament will last until October 9, when the finals will go live.
The Academy tournament’s format implies that the final four winning teams will earn their seeds to the LAN finals of the separate CS: GO event from WePlay Esports.
The Ukrainian CS: GO tournament will be officially broadcasted in English and Russian languages.
The group stage of the second season of WePlay Academy League will consist of two groups, where the teams will face each other, using the double elimination GSL format.
First place winner in the each group goes directly to the LAN finals part of the event.
Teams, who finished second place and third place in their groups, will fight for the last two remaining places in the finals of the event in the next stage of the tournament — the Last Chance group.
The prize pool of this part of the competition is equal to $12,000. All the tournament’s matches will be played as the Bo3 series of games.
Playoffs
The playoffs of the WePlay Academy League Season 2, featuring a $88,000 prize pool, will be aired live from the WePlay Esports Arena in Kyiv, Ukraine. In the final part of the Academy CS: GO league, four remaining teams will decide the winner of the whole event.
The final playoffs part of the event will go on for two days, on November 12-14.
The first team will get the $45,000 prize money, which equals to 51% from the whole prize pool of the tournament. The closest pursuer will go away with $20,000, third and fourth places will get $15,000 and $8,000, respectively.
All final event’s games will be Bo3 series, except the final Bo5 series, where the winning team coming from the upper bracket of the event will have one map win advantage, compared to the winner of the lower bracket finals.
First Season
This will be the second season of the WePlay Esports’ Academy CS: GO league. The first season was played during July-August 2021.
In the playoffs of the WePlay Academy League Season 1, team mouz NXT were first in the final standings of the event. The German team earned $45,000 for their top place finish.
The winners of the event managed to beat team BIG with the 2:0 score in the first round of the upper bracket. Then, the German squad lost the upper bracket finals with the 1:2 score against the likes of the opposing team — Young Ninjas.
In the LB finals, the mouz team were stronger than Fnatic. The game ended with the 2:1 score in favor of the Germans.
mouz NXT secured their win in the grand finals of the WePlay’s event, against the likes of the same opponent from Sweden, this time crushing them with the 3:1 score in a Bo5 series.
Team Young Ninjas came second with the $20,000 prize money. Teams Fnatic Rising and BIG Academy finished third and fourth, earning $15,000 and $8,000 each.
Na’Vi Academy and Flamie
According to the latest information from various sources on the esports scene, arguably one of the best CS: GO players in the world, Egor Vasilev, better known as Flamie, will play for the Na’Vi Academy team during the upcoming tournament from WePlay Esports.
It was previously rumored that Vasilev was about to join partly Kazakh‘s roster of Virtus.pro, but it was then said that the transfer will not happen, because one of the best Russian CS: GO organizations were already certain about their fifth player on the team.
The 24-year-old Russian player recently won 1v1 CS: GO competition, which was organized by one of the most popular CIS streamers and Virtus.pro player — Timur “buster” Tulepov.
During the 2020 season, Flamie was periodically substituted by team Natus Vincere’s newest talent addition — Valeriy “B1t” Vakhovskiy.
Team Na’Vi head coach, the 34-year-old Andrey “B1ad3” Gorodenskiy initially planned to use the player roster consisting of six members, until Valve released an update to their competitive rules.
Flamie’s legacy
Vasilev successfully competed for the main Na’Vi team for the last six years. He started competing professionally in 2012, and was on HellRaisers before joining the roster of the Ukrainian multigaming esports organization in 2015.
The famed Na’Vi player won a lot of tournaments with the Ukrainian CS: GO team. One of his biggest recent results was finishing first with his team at one of the BLAST Premier tournaments — BLAST Premier: Global Final 2020 in January 2021, where the CIS squad beat their rivals, legendary Danes from Astralis, with the 2:0 score in the finals of the event, earining $600,000 prize money.
Flamie triumphed with Na’Vi at Intel Extreme Masters XIV — World Championship, an IEM series event, which was held in Katowice in March-April 2020, where his Na’Vi team were unstoppable during the playoffs, and managed to beat the opposing team — G2 Esports, with the 3:0 score in the finals, earning $250,000.
Michal Blicharz from ESL Gaming, who is also known as Carmac, recently informed the public that Flamie, as a former Na’Vi player, is fully eligible for the part of the team’s prize money, the $1,000,000 they earned from winning the Intel Grand Slam Season 3, as the result of their EPL victory at the recent ESL Pro League Season 14 tournament.