The talent pool for the upcoming major at Cologne has been officially released by ESL.
ESL Cologne will feature a $1,000,000 prize pool and the winners of the tournament will receive a massive prize of $500,000. The eight legends teams that were guaranteed spots at this year's tournament are Luminosity (now SK Gaming), Navi, Astralis, Liquid, NiP, Fnatic, CLG, and Virtus Pro and the eight challenger teams that fought their way to spots this year are FaZe, OpTic, Gambit, EnVyUs, Dignitas, Flipsid3, and G2.
The entire 14 person pool of talent for Cologne is as follows:
Stage Host:
Paul "ReDeYe" Chaloner
Roaming Host:
Mitch "UberShouts" Leslie
Analyst Desk Host:
Alex "Machine" Richardson
Analysts:
Duncan "Thorin" Shields
Janko "YNK" Paunovi?
Jason "Moses" O'Toole
Commentators:
Anders Blume
Auguste "Semmler" Massonnat
Henry "HenryG" Greer
Matthew "Sadokist" Trivett
Daniel "ddk" Kapadia
James "JZFB" Bardolph
Lauren "Pansy" Scott
John " BLU" Mullen
This year the tournament is held much earlier than normal - Cologne 2015 was held from August 20-23 - this year it is July 5-10th, decreasing the time for teams to recover and bootcamp before the most important tournament of the year. Due to the early start, the Grand finals will precede the finals of UEFA Euro 2016, so the event staff are planning to hold a public viewing of the match directly following the Grand Final.
Our complete coverage of ESL One Cologne will be available here.
Headline image courtesy of: ESL Twitter
