ESL Pro League to start

Last month, ESL announced that they would hand out $750,000 during the online and the offline stages to the attendees of the third edition of their tournament, adding that ESEA would no longer be a title sponsor and the league would be named the ESL Pro League. 

Twelve teams each from North America and Europe will contend to finish in the top four positions in their respective leagues to book their tickets for the LAN finals in London. With eight teams in total, the finals will take place from May 12-15th in a venue that will be revealed by ESL at a later date.

The new season, starting on February 9, will bring minor changes to the format including the scheduling of the matches. Each team will face their opponents twice and back-to-back, meaning they will go up against one another consecutively on two different maps in the same day.

During the veto process, two teams veto two maps without knowing their opponent's bans and out of the remaining maps, two maps are randomly selected to be played. The online season is expected to conclude on April 26, more than two weeks before the LAN event.

FaZe and FlipSid3, replacing HellRaisers and PENTA, are the new European league members as all the other teams are the same as the second season. The North American division will host a few different names from the last season such as OpTic whose players formerly represented Conquest. The biggest addition will be Renegades as they finally picked up a spot to compete in the American region.

The complete team list looks as follows:

North America	Europe
Team Liquid	fnatic
Luminosity	Astralis
OpTic	Null element Na`Vi
CLG	EnVyUs
compLexity	G2
Cloud9	dignitas
Splyce	NiP
Enemy	mousesports
Winterfox	Virtus.pro
AGG	SK
NRG	FlipSid3
Renegades	FaZe

The league's schedule which can be found below has been set according to other LAN finals and most of the matches will be played during weekdays.

• Week 1 (February 9-12) - Tuesday to Friday
• Week 2 (Feb. 16-19) - Monday to Friday
• Week 3 (Feb. 23-25) - Tuesday to Thursday
• Week 4 (March 8-14) - Tuesday to Monday
• Week 5 (Mar. 15-21) - Tuesday to Monday
• Week 6 (Mar. 21-24) - Tuesday to Thursday
• Week 7 (April 6-7) - Wednesday & Thursday
• Week 8 (Apr. 20-24) - Tuesday to Monday
• Week 9 (Apr. 26) - Tuesday

You can find the complete schedule for season three here as you wait for it to kick off when Astralis takes on Na`Vi on February 9 at 19:00 which will be streamed on ESL's Twitch channel.

Follow HLTV.org writer BenjaCS on twitter.