PGL to host next Major in Stockholm*

The first Major in two years will run from October 23-November 7 and feature a $2 million prize pool.

*Update: Valve has confirmed that the participating teams will be identified via a series of RMR events, which will initially take place online and culminate with at least one offline RMR tournament before the Major.

The next CS:GO Major tournament will be hosted by PGL in Stockholm, Sweden, the organizers have announced. The playoffs of the event will be held in front of a live audience at the Ericsson Globe, a ~16,000-seater venue where the DreamHack Invitational in 2014 and DreamHack Masters Stockholm in 2018 took place and which was supposed to house The International 2020 in DOTA 2 before it was postponed.

The organizers have stressed that the tournament will only occur if "all safety conditions to hold live competitive events are met by that time," referring to the development of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still an issue across the globe.

PGL promises that the event will be streamed in 4K resolution, which will make it the first Major tournament to do so, and that it is preparing innovative augmented reality elements as well as other brand new features for the broadcast.

"First of all, my colleagues and I are passionate fans of CS. We grew up and watched this game getting bigger and bigger, just at the same pace as our development as a company," PGL CEO Silviu Stroie said in a statement. "We have timeless memories with our past Counter-Strike shows, and, honestly, we owe a lot to this game, as players, and as a company. We believe that this community deserves the best product this franchise has ever seen. Our goal is to celebrate the game in the best way possible, and we will work hard for this."

Here are some of the best betting sites for CSGO.

This marks the first Major-related news since early December, when Valve canceled its plans to organize a Major in May of 2021 and revealed that it is looking to host the next tournament in the fall, in Europe.

The Stockholm event will be the first Major to take place since the StarLadder Major was held in August-September in 2019. Plans for the following Valve-sponsored tournament, ESL One: Rio, were first postponed and later scrapped because of limitations related to the pandemic.

Since then, Valve has helped organize and sponsor Regional Major Ranking events, creating a qualifying system that they aimed to use to keep track of the competition and to determine the participants of the next Major.