Following our announcement about the first set of details surrounding the ESL Pro Tour in 2025, today we’re going to touch on how tournament seeding will work in relation to the format changes we’ve implemented for the upcoming year.
For ESL Pro League we will be shaking things up with the change to a Swiss Tournament Format. In doing so we will be bringing back the Team Selected Seeding and Live Ratings, both of which we introduced first at IEM Chicago in 2018 and successfully used during the IEM Katowice Major in 2019.
Team selected seeding
The initial seeding for Swiss Stage 1 and Stage 2 will be established from teams’ insights to create an accurate ranking of all participants. All sixteen teams in each stage will be asked to rank their fifteen opponents based on skill. Individual team votes that are outside of the expected range of the spread will be discarded in order to eliminate anomalies (e.g. a team giving a team #15 when most other teams rated them as #1) as a precaution to rule out collusion.
live ratings
Following the initial Team Selected Seeding, teams will be assigned ELO-like ratings corresponding to their seed positions, with higher seeds receiving more points. Each Swiss round will then be seeded according to the teams' current ratings, which will be dynamically updated after each match. Teams will be paired based on their updated ratings, with the restriction that no rematches will occur.
The objective of live ratings is to continuously adjust team rankings to more accurately reflect their current performance. For example, if the #16 seed defeated the #1 seed, this result suggests the #16 team is performing above expectations, and their rating will be adjusted accordingly.
With the above in mind, the three tournament stages of ESL Pro League (Stage 1, Stage 2 & Playoffs) will use seeding in the following ways:
- Team Selected Seeding will set the baseline ratings to create seeds and produce the opening matchups in Stage 1 and Stage 2
- Live Ratings after every Swiss round using the rating system, which replaces the Buchholz system
- Seeding for the playoffs will be using the results of Stage 2 and the corresponding Live Ratings to break any ties (e.g. the two teams with a 3-0 record)
Outro
For all of our other events, let that be ESL Pro Tour Championship and Masters events, these will remain largely the same in terms of seeding and the only change being applied is the change from using ESL World Ranking to Global Valve Regional Standings for the pre-tournament seeding.
To keep up to date with ESL Pro Tour for 2025 and not miss any important updates, as always, make sure to sign up for our newsletter and follow ESLCS on X, Instagram, and Facebook.
