European Amateur League - Season 1

The first season of the **European Amateur League**, often abbreviated as **EAL**, was an amateur Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament. The tournament started on April 21st, 2018, and finished on May 27th, 2018. Cryogenic eSports defeated Blackout Mix, 2-1, in the best-of-three final.

The group stages will be in a Swiss System format running for three rounds, with the four best teams progressing to the play-offs. The play-offs were held between May 19th and May 27th, 2018.

## About

### Map Pool

* Cobblestone
* Cache
* Inferno
* Mirage
* Nuke
* Overpass
* Train

### Teams

* Blackout Mix
* Bloodthirsty Elite
* CS Gudarna!
* DTRE
* Lucent Academy
* monkaS
* North Sea Academy
* North Sea Gaming
* Orgless
* Rai.GG
* SOTR
* Scorpius eSports
* Stigma eSports
* T1
* Thrive Esports
* Team Vizion

## Final Placements

*1* *The Scorpius eSports roster was acquired by Cryogenic Esports on May 24th, 2018, 3 days before they won the tournament.*

\*Team forfeited/disbanded

## Results

**Swiss System Round 1 (21-23 April 2018):**

* Orgless 10-16 Vizion
* Lucent 19-15 NSG
* Gudarna 0-16 Thrive
* Stigma 16-1 SOTR
* monkaS 2-16 Scorpius
* Blackout Mix 16-5 T1
* NSA 16-3 Bloodthirsty Elite
* DTRE 5-16 Rai.GG

**Swiss System** **Round 2 (28-1 April-May 2018)**

* NSA 0-16 Rai.GG
* Thrive 3-16 Vizion
* Stigma 16-9 Lucent
* Blackout Mix 16-14 Scorpius
* DTRE 13-16 monkaS
* Orgless 14-16 NSG
* SOTR 12-16 T1
* Bloodthirsty Elite 5-16 Guardana

**Swiss System Round 3 (5-8 May 2018):**

* Thrive vs Scorpius
* Stigma Esports 5-16 Rai.gg
* DTRE 16-5 SOTR
* monkaS 16-0 CS Guardana!
* Blackout Mix 16-6 Vizion

**Swiss System Round 4 (12-14 May 2018):**

* Stigma vs Scorpius
* monkaS vs T1
* DTRE 16-0 Guardana

**Quarter-Finals (best-of-three, 19-21 May 2018)**

* DTRE W-L Rai
* Blackout Mix 2-0 Thrive (16-7 Inferno, 16-2 Cache)
* monkaS L-W T1
* Lucent L-W Scorpius

**Semi-Finals (best-of-three 25-27 May 2018)**

* DTRE vs Cryogenic\* (2-0 to Cryogenic)
* Blackout Mix vs T1 (2-0 to Blackout Mix)

*\*The roster of Scorpius eSports was acquired by Cryogenic.*

**Final**

* Cryogenic\* vs Blackout Mix (2-1 to Cryogenic)

## Organisation

Founded by Samuel Preston, Conner Bailey and Jack Lawrence during March 2018, European Amateur League (EAL) is an events organisation dedicated to bringing the best tournaments and leagues for contestants and viewers alike.

With a strong team of admins, EAL hosts tournaments, leagues and a FACEIT Hub where anyone can participate. Our admin team consists of the following:

## FACEIT Hub

### Format

#### General Rules

* 5v5
* Friendly Fire Enabled
* Restricted to Solo Queue
* All players must be sat within the appropriate Discord channel
* Both teams on each side of a Hub Match will have audio recorded
* Start with 1,000 points
* 4 Points for a win
* -3 Points for a loss
* £25 Prize for 1st Place each Season1
* £15 Prize for 2nd Place each Season2

1 *This prize was originally £5 for the inaugural season, which was a month long. Seasons 2 and 3 were then changed to a week long with the idea of £5 per week rather than the initial £5 per month before being changed to £10 per season for Season 4 which was two weeks long, and Season 5 will use a £40 prize pool for the full month, with £25 of that going to the winner.*

2 *This £15 prize for the runner-up was introduced for Season 5 as part of the new £40 prize pool.*

#### Map Pool

* Cache
* Cobblestone
* Dust 2
* Inferno
* Mirage
* Nuke
* Overpass
* Train

#### Server Pool

* France
* Germany
* Netherlands
* Sweden

*\*UK Server Location removed from pool after multiple issues during Season 1 and 2*

#### Seasons 1-3

The inaugural season of the EAL Faceit Hub used ELO-based Captain selection from the beginning, however this was later changed to Role-based Captain selection due to a number of unbalanced matches due to high-level Faceit players joining the hub and picking players poorly, presumably as they had no knowledge of the players within the hub, these roles were based upon total matches played on the All-Time Leaderboard, this rule continued to be used until Season 4. The first four seasons also used the ABBA player-picking format in an attempt to balance out the advantage of first pick.

#### Season 4

The fourth season of the EAL Faceit Hub saw a change in both major formatting decisions, with the role-based captain selection being returned to the original ELO-based captain selection as suggested by WarDog and Pablo after a number of unbalanced games. And the ABBA player-picking system was changed back to the default ABAB system due to complaints of unbalanced games.

### History

#### Season 1

On March 31st, 2018 EAL decided to launch a Faceit Hub for their community to play against each other. On Wednesday, April 11th they introduced Season One of the EAL Faceit Hub which ran until Monday, 30th April with a prize of £5 for the eventual winner, WarDog, who finished with an 81% win rate after 27 matches played (21 won) and finished 15 points above second-placed com1ntern. The inaugural season saw 200 players take part.

#### Season 2

Season 2 of the EAL Faceit Hub commenced on Tuesday, 1st May, 2018 and ran until Monday. 7th May. After four days of play it looked as if Merlin and Zippo were competing for the top spot before WarDog and Archie both came out of nowhere in contention for the top spot within the last three days of Season 2. The season finished with WarDog yet again taking the £5 prize with a prolific 11 games won out of 12 giving him a win rate of 92%, he finished on 1,041 points, two points above second-placed Merlin, seven points above third-placed Archie, and Zippo slipped down to fourth place, eight points behind WarDog. The Second season saw a dip in total player to 122, however, this can be explained by the length of the season declining from 16 days in Season 1 to 7 days in Season 2 (12.5 players p/ day for Season 1 compared to 17.4 players p/ day for Season 2)

#### Season 3

The third season of the EAL Faceit Hub began on Tuesday, 8th May, 2018 and finished on Monday, 14th May. This time around there was a new competitor to the hub, HTR, this combined with WarDog, Archie and com1ntern's lack of involvement in Season 3 resulted in a fairly comfortable victory for HTR who finished with 9 wins out of 10, a 90% win rate and a total of 1,033 points, the second-placed finisher Zippo ended the season with 9 matches won out of 16, a 56% win rate and 1,015 points. The Third season saw a dip down to 91 players (a decrease of 4.4 players p/ day down to 13 players p/ day).

#### Season 4

The fourth season of the EAL Faceit Hub commenced on Tuesday, 15th May, 2018 and ended on Thursday, 31st May, 2018 and saw 144 competitors take part for the £10 prize. After the first week it seemed as if the race for first place was between Sonocs and LeftyUK, however during the second week it became apparent that it would actually be between roxey and jAustere. The last couple of days saw roxey comfortably take the lead and it looked like he would claim the prize, but jAustere pulled off a shocking win on the last day after a match took place that decided the first, second and third places. The final standings jAustere take the victory with 1,042 points and 15 wins out of 21, giving him a win rate of 71%, the runner-up roxey finished with 1,034 points and 22 wins from 40 matches, resulting in a win rate of 55%, and the third place went to Pablo who finished with 1,030 points with 12 wins from 18, resulting in a 67% win ratio. The early runners, Sonocs and LeftyUK finished in 5th and 141st respectively.

## External Links

* Twitter
* Discord
* FACEIT Hub
* Twitch
* Site
* YouTube
* Season 1 Toornament page

**Cancelled Events:**  Season 3
**Winners:** Cryogenic Esports (Season 1), GGuys (Season 2), Fli6ht Gaming (Christmas Charity Event), Vape-Company Esports (Winter 2019)