EC 2013 qualifiers and schedule

The organizers of European Championship 2013 have announced the schedule for their upcoming tournament, as well as the format which will consist of two rounds of qualifiers, followed by a 24-team group stage and eventually playoffs.

Registration period ended with 42 national teams signed up for European Championship 2013, so it was time to learn the format of the competition and the preliminary schedule.

Twelve nations whose players had the most success in CS:GO so far will be given direct berth to the group stage, while another twelve will be found through the qualifying process, resulting with 4 groups of 6 teams. These are the twelve that will start the competition directly in the group stage.

Sweden	France
Denmark	Russia
Poland	Germany
Slovakia	Ukraine
United Kingdom	Portugal
Belgium	Finland

The qualifying process will consist of two rounds, with twelve teams starting at the bottom, and then half of them joining the remaining eighteen in qualification round 2.

Twelve of the teams that await in the second round have been seeded, and they will be randomly paired up against the rest, playing best-of-three matches to clinch a spot in the group stage.

Seeded teams	Non-seeded teams
Norway	Hungary
Czech Republic	Ireland
Serbia	Austria
Turkey	Belarus
Bosnia & Herzegovina	Bulgaria
Spain	Lithuania
Kazakhstan	+6 winners from QR1
Romania
Latvia
Italy
Switzerland
Netherlands

The twelve teams that will kick off the tournament next week with qualification round 1 are the following:

Slovenia	Armenia
Montenegro	Greece
Andorra	Moldova
Iceland	Croatia
Luxembourg	Estonia
Israel	Macedonia

The match-ups for qualification round 1 will be drawn on Monday, September 2nd, while round two is set to start only after DreamHack Bucharest. Here is the preliminary schedule:

All qualification matches will be played in best-of-three mode, while the group stage will be played best-of-one. Four teams will advance from each group into single-elimination best-of-three playoffs, starting with round of sixteen. For more information about the format visit E-Frag.net.

The organizers have also confirmed that the vote on their website resulted in picking the standard five maps for the competition, meaning no de_cache or de_season will be seen in the pool.