Tournament organiser BLAST has announced BLAST Rising, an online tournament for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
The event will be produced by Fantasyexpo, a licensee of BLAST Premier’s Polish broadcast rights.
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The event will pit 16 teams from across Europe, of differing skill levels, against each other for a total prize pool of €30,000 (£26,193.09). BLAST will choose teams that are “ones to watch outside of the upper reaches of the rankings.”
Nicolas Estrup, Director of Product and Experience for BLAST, spoke on the event in a release: “At BLAST we love the elite and allow everyone to be a part of Premier through the Qualifier Series and the Race to the Global Final, but have created BLAST Rising to support teams and players at all stages of their careers. By giving teams and players more opportunity and exposure in the way only BLAST can, we want BLAST Rising to be a platform that drives forward their personal and team growth.”
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The teams will be revealed by April 28th, featuring 48 best-of-one matches and seven best-of-three series. BLAST Rising is said to be the first initiative in BLAST’s commitment to those outside of the top ranks.
Krzysztof Stypułkowski, Co-founder of Fantasyexpo, also commented: “BLAST Rising tournament will be an amazing experience for esports fans as well as the players, who will participate in . The structure of the tournament is organised in a way so it can provide a lot of emotions from the first matches until the very final. Mixing the teams from different HLTV levels will spice things up and allow lower ranked teams to fight with those better than them, which can bring a lot of surprises and game-changing action. I am very happy that we are organizing this tournament together with BLAST.”
Esports Insider says: After the recent perception change of BLAST, and seeing how it fits into the new-look CS:GO calendar, we have no doubt that people will be excited for BLAST Rising. We’re intrigued to see how far this initiative goes, with the tournament organiser noting that it’s looking to host similar events “around the world.”