The tournament organiser ESL has announced changes to the seeding system for upcoming ESL Pro League championships. These changes will come into effect in 2025 for the 21st and 22nd seasons of the Pro League.
The initial seeding will now be determined by the participants themselves in the Swiss stage. Each team will rank its opponents based on strength, and the organisers will use these rankings to allocate teams for the first and second stages of the Swiss system. Outlier votes, where a team's assessment of an opponent greatly differs from the majority, will be discarded to eliminate anomalies.
Once the initial seeding has been set, each team will be assigned an ELO rating based on their seeding position (higher seeds will receive a higher rating). In each round of the Swiss stage, teams will face opponents based on these dynamic ratings, which will be updated after every match. Teams will only face each other once.
This seeding system was previously implemented at IEM Chicago 2018 and IEM Katowice Major 2019.
It should also be noted that ESL recently revealed the LAN tournament calendar for Counter-Strike 2 in 2025, which includes seven events, five of which will be Intel Extreme Masters tournaments.