The LAN Sweet LAN 2023 tournament is a competition organized by Relog Media, a Serbian tournament organizer, and sponsored by GRID. It is an offline tournament of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and it will take place in Belgrade, the capital city of Serbia, in August. The start date is the 15th of August, while the end date has yet to be announced, at the moment in which this article is written.
The venue of the tournament will be Relog Media Studio, which has already been used by some teams during the online era; and it is a tournament in which sixteen teams will compete for a prize pool of a total of $ 250,000 USD. The event was to be called initially Home Sweet Home, but eventually, Relog Media changed the name to LAN Sweet LAN, the actual name of the tournament, in order to stress the fact that the event will not be held online, but in LAN mode.
We also have to notice that it is the biggest event organized by the company to date. Another info, still unannounced, is that of the format of the competition: indeed at the moment we don’t yet know this and neither do we know if they matches are going to be Bo3, or Bo5, or what. It will be possible, for us fans of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to follow the tournament in streaming on Twitch.
Another thing we can look at, although the information about the tournament is not that much at the moment, is the maps on which the various teams taking part in the tournament will compete for one against the other:
- Ancient
- Dust II
- Inferno
- Mirage
- Nuke
- Overpass
- Vertigo
Let us now have a look together at more information about the teams participating, the company, and the prize.
Teams and Format
As we briefly said above, the teams competing in this tournament will be sixteen, and the composition is as follows: four teams are invited, and they have not been announced yet, the other twelve teams come from the monthly tournaments organized by Relog Media. Thus three teams will come from the Snow Sweet Snow tournament, another three from Spring Sweet Spring tournament, the others from the Pinnacle Fall Series tournament, and lastly three other teams from the Pinnacle Winter Series tournament, of which one has yet to be defined. The teams confirmed at the moment of the writing of this article are:
- FunPlus Phoenix
- HAVU Gaming
- MOUZ
- forZe
- OG
- Complexity
- Virtus.pro
- Entropiq
- ECSTATIC
- K23
- Heroic
All these teams have won the monthly tournaments and are expected to play at their best in this major event tournament.
About Relog Media
Relog Media is a Serbian esports tournament organizer and production company, with headquarters in Belgrade and established in 2019. As we said above they also operate a bootcamp facility that has hosted numerous famous teams, like MIBR, FaZe Clan, and Cloud9. As for this tournament, they often cooperate with the sponsor GRID and they are mostly known for the series Home Sweet Home, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, which forced the esports industry to mostly moving tournaments online.
Thus they are still a young company and they still have much to offer to the esports fans, so we can firmly believe that this first very big tournament will be a milestone for them and will be the start of even greater tournaments and events. We can say this based on looking at the records of the company, which in the last few years has accumulated a quite big number of events, with an increasing number of famous teams and also increasing prizes.
Prize and Fees
We have to admit that we know very little about the prize yet. Indeed, at the moment the only certain thing we know about the prize pool is that it will amount to $ 250,000 USD, which is a great amount of money. But we do not yet know how it will be shared among the various competitors based on their position. This, we hope, will be announced soon by the organizers, Relog Media, although quite some time still separates us from the competition.
What we can say is that certainly, however much of the $ 250,000 in percentage, will go to the winner of the tournament, the competition will be fierce and all of the teams will try to win and impress the public. This is because winning the LAN Sweet LAN competition, might not only bring them quite a big amount of money, but also notoriety, and so invitations to other, even bigger, events.
Conclusions
As we can all understand from what said above, many matches have yet to be played and many things to be decided, like the invited teams and how the prize pool will be shared among the competitors. Indeed, although qualifications are quite decided, apart for Pinnacle Winter Series 2, the invited teams are still in unknown.
But what is certain is that if you are a fan of CS:GO competitions, you will surely enjoy the show brought to you by Relog Media. This as it is not simply a tournament, but it is something even more important. Indeed it is a chance for the playing teams not only to win quite a consistent prize, but also to affirm themselves and establish a route towards success.
But this is not all, like as always the implications are not only material and it is not everything about careers, but it is also about conquering some fans and building a community, which is always helpful in building something bigger. We can thus declare ourselves anxious to see what this competition will bring about and how it will all evolve.
