- ESL has announced that the IEM Global Challenge in 2020 will take place on LAN.
- It will be hosted in Cologne, Germany between 15th-20th December 2020.
- It will be the first CSGO LAN Tournament since March 2020.
Plenty of CSGO LAN events across the world were canceled or moved to an online format in early March, shortly after IEM Season 14 World Championship, due to the ongoing global health crisis. The last CSGO LAN tournament before this pandemic was the IEM Katowice 2020 which ended on 1st March 2020. Since then CSGO tournaments like the ESL Pro League Season 12 and ESL ONE Cologne were held online instead of LAN.
The tournament will be featuring a massive prize pool of $500,000 which comes from the amount deferred from ESL One Cologne 2020 earlier this year. The amount was originally meant to be redistributed for tournaments taking place in 2020.
This tournament will be a part of the Intel Grand Slam Season 3 and will be witnessing participation from 8 directly invited teams. The 8 invited teams will be divided into 2 groups of 4 teams each, both these groups will follow a best-of-three double-elimination format as the top two teams from each group qualify for the playoffs. The playoffs will feature a single-elimination bracket with each match being a three-game series except for the grand final which will be a best-of-five series.
As of now, it is unclear how this event will be operated to include the necessary safety measures, although it is possible that ESL could host a bubble format, similar to what has been planned for League of Legends' Worlds 2020.