16 teams from the West and 16 teams from the East take part as the first group stage matches are initiated today. The group phase lasts until October 16 after which regional playoffs take over.
UPDATE: The Chinese teams are now announced.
As announced three weeks ago, the $50,000 Synergy League will be starting today with 16 Western teams and 16 South East Asian teams split into regional groups of eight. There's also a group with six Chinese teams announced but it will not start until October 12. In the end eight teams will qualify for the offline event in Barnaul, Russia which is a bit of a different location than we are used to since most other events in CIS are hosted in the western part whereas Barnaul is located more to the East close to Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
There will be three South East Asian matches and three Western matches happening every day starting today and ending October 16. The day after, the 17th of October, is when the regional playoffs will start where top four of each group advance to the double elimination bracket to settle who eventually qualifies for the offline playoffs. The groups can be seen below, Chinese division to be announced later.
Europe
South East Asia
China
Unfortunately, it seems as if some teams cancelled their participation since the original announcement, amongst those are Team Tinker are Secret Team. Speaking of secret teams, there is a Russian mystery team called Synergy participating in group A of the European group stage. When asking admins what the roster of the team is, they simply replied "It's a secret" and "You'll see tonight".
