Electronic Sports League One Cologne 2014, known as ESL One Cologne 2014 for short, was the third that was held during Gamescom 2014 from August 14–17, 2014 at the Cologne Exhibition Centre in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was the second CS:GO Major of 2014. It was organized by Electronic Sports League with sponsorship from Valve. The tournament had a total prize pool of US$250,000. The Train map was removed for the tournament, while Cache and Overpass, as well as the Cbble remix Cobblestone were added. Overpass was released by Valve only a month before the tournament, and the decision to add a new map with such short notice and at Major event caused some controversy. Ninjas in Pyjamas was the winner of the event after beating Fnatic 2-1 in the finals. The tournament was livestreamed on the official ESL Twitch channel. 409,368 concurrent viewers watched the grand finals, while 2,950,600 total unique viewers watched the event across four days. dAT Team player Egor "Flamie" Vasilyev was alleged to have cheated in a qualifier by using an account that may not have his due it having an unusually low number of playing hours. Ultimately he was allowed to compete.
Format
The top seven teams of the EMS One Katowice 2014 qualified as Legends. Six teams from Europe, one team from North America, one team from the Oceanic region, and one team from India played online qualifiers in order to play in the tournament Teams will be split up into four groups. All group matches are best of a. The highest seed will play the lowest seed in each group and the second and third seeds will play against each other. The winner of those two matches will play to determine which team moves on to the Playoffs; the loser of that match will play another match against the winner of the two losing teams. The loser of the lower match is eliminated from the tournament. The last two teams will play each other and the winner of that match moves on to the playoffs. The playoffs bracket consists of eight teams, two from each group. All of these matches are a best of three, single elimination format. Teams advance in the bracket until a winner is decided.
Map Pool
There were seven maps to choose from, two more than the previous major. Cache, Overpass, and Cobblestone were added to the map pool and Train was taken out. In the group stage, both teams can delete two maps. From the remaining three maps, the map is randomly selected, which is played in the end. In the playoffs, each team will first remove one map. Then, each side chooses a map, which will be played in the first two matches. If the series were to go to a third map, that map is randomly selected among the three remaining maps.
Qualifiers
European Qualifier
There were 16 teams in the main European qualifier. 4 teams from each regional qualifier – Open, North, Southeast, and Southwest – were in the tournament. The tournament was a best of three, double-elimination bracket. The unshown teams in the Loser's bracket were USSR Team, ESC Gaming, mTw, and tomtebloss.
This was a 16 team, single elimination bracket with just one team qualifying for the playoffs.
Oceanic Qualifier
This was an 8 team, single elimination bracket with just one team qualifying for the playoffs.
Indian Qualifier
LGB eSports, which placed third at the previous major, disbanded, so only seven Legends remained. The tournament organizers decided to fill up the remaining spot with a team from India. This qualifier had 8 teams. The teams played in a robin round and the top four teams played in a double elimination bracket. Only the grand final score appears to be found.
