Esports World Cup organisers have published the group distribution for the tournament's $2 million Counter-Strike main event, releasing the draw shortly after the Last Chance Qualifier settled the final four places in the field, according to HLTV.
The 32 qualified teams have been seeded into four groups of eight. Seeding was taken from the July edition of the Valve Regional Standings, the ranking Valve maintains to order invitations and placements across the Counter-Strike calendar.
That produced one immediate quirk in the draw. Two of the four teams that came through the Last Chance Qualifier, BIG and JiJieHao, were both placed in Group A. HLTV attributes the pairing to BIG's position in the July standings, which sat ahead of several sides that had been invited directly to the event on the previous month's numbers.
How the group stage runs
The group stage begins on Wednesday, August 12 and runs through to Sunday, August 16. Each group is played in a double-elimination format, with the opening matches contested as best-of-ones and every match after that extended to a best-of-three.
The top four teams from each group advance, producing a 16-team single-elimination bracket. Those playoffs are scheduled for August 19 to 23, and the grand final will be played at the Accor Arena.
The structure gives teams room to recover from a poor start: a side that loses its opening best-of-one still has a route through the lower half of its group, and the move to best-of-threes after the first round reduces the weight of any single map for the teams contesting the final qualifying places.
The draw closes a qualifying process that ran right up to the announcement. The last four entrants were decided in the Last Chance Qualifier, and organisers published the group allocations shortly after that bracket finished, leaving the teams involved under a week to prepare before the opening matches.
HLTV published the full group allocations alongside its report on the draw.
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