The ESL One Rio Major 2020, also known as ESL One Rio 2020 or Rio 2020, is scheduled to be the sixteenth . It will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from November 9 to November 22, 2020. It features a 2,000,000 prize pool and twenty-four professional teams from around the world as with previous Majors. Twenty four teams around the world will qualify through regional qualifiers called the Road to Rio. It will be the seventh time ESL will be hosting a Major. The Major was originally scheduled to take place from May 11 to May 24, 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Valve and ESL announced that the Major will be postponed to the November dates. In addition, the Major will combine the prize pool of the Rio Major with the prize pool of the originally scheduled November Major, making the event the first major to feature a prize pool of 2,000,000.
Background
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a multiplayerfirst-person shooter video game developed by Hidden Path Entertainment and Valve. It is the fourth game in the Counter-Strike series. In competitive play, the game pits two teams against each other: the Terrorists and the Counter-Terrorists. Both sides are tasked with eliminating the other while also completing separate objectives. The Terrorists must either plant a bomb or kill the entire Counter-Terrorist team, while the Counter-Terrorists must either prevent the bomb from being planted by killing the entire Terrorist team or defusing the bomb. Once the bomb is planted, counter-terrorists have forty seconds to defuse the bomb; under normal circumstances, it takes ten seconds to defuse the bomb, but purchasing a defuse kit reduces the defuse time to five seconds. At the end of each round, players are rewarded based on their individual performance with in-game currency to spend on more powerful weapons in subsequent rounds. Winning rounds results in more money than losing, and completing objectives such as killing enemy players gives cash bonuses. However, the more consecutive rounds a team loses, the more money the losing team earns, with the loss bonus capping after five rounds; once that team wins a round, the loss round bonus resets to the minimum amount each player could earn after a round.
Format
There are six regional qualifiers – North America, South America, Europe, CIS, Asia, and Oceania. Each regional qualifier received a set amount of spots in the Rio Major. The number of spots corresponds with the amount of teams from that region at the previous major, the Berlin Major.
Before the Rio Major, each major had four regional qualifiers. Each regional qualifier, called "Minors", featured eight teams per region. Because of the 14 month gap between the Rio Major and the Berlin Major, Valve revised the system into the Road to Rio.
