ImbaTV has announced the third iteration of i-league. i-League season three will feature a 2,000,000 RMB (~$300,000) prize pool which will be fought over by eight teams from around the world. Notable teams in the tournament are Old Boys and LGD Gaming.
The event will consist of five Chinese teams and a team from the SEA, NA and European team. Only one team received a direct invite to the tournament, they are defending champions LGD Gaming. The other seven teams will be required to play through a qualifier. The LAN finals is scheduled for May 19-24.
There will be two formats for the qualifiers, one for the Chinese qualifiers and one for the other regions. The format for the non-Chinese qualifiers are a single elimination best of three bracket where the winner receives the invite, for the EU/NA qualifiers EG's manager confirmed on Twitter that EG has rejected their qualifier participation. Qualifiers for Europe and North America as well as South East Asian qualifiers will be held from April 6 to April 19, after that the Chinese qualifiers will commence.
The Chinese qualifiers will be split into two stages, an open qualifier and an invitation based qualifier. The first stage, the open qualifier will see teams who signed up split into two group; in the groups, the teams will battle it out in a single elimination best of one format until the last one standing. The winners of their groups will then proceed to the invitation based qualifier where they will be split into two groups of six where they will play out a best of two round robin; top two of their group gets a direct invite. It is worth noting that OldBoys, a team consisting of retired legends of the Dota2 scene such as Cen 'YYF' Jiang and Zuo '820' Yi Tian will be participating in stage one of the Chinese qualifiers.
i-League is a tournament who has a history of facing multiple issues, problems from previous events include ambiguous prize pool and multiple teams pulling out, in i-League season two, they got into a spat over the banning of Cloud9 from participating in the tournament due to their last minute and 'unreasonable' pull out.
Source: ImbaTv, Charlie Yang's Twitter
Headline image by StarLadder
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