Thunderpick will be hosting a CS:GO World Tournament offering a $600,000 prize pool entirely of Bitcoin for a selection of the 16 teams attending. The event will commence on July 10, and run through to November.
The crypto betting platform plans to split $100,000 between four qualifying stages, and the remaining $500,000 segmented across the participants in the latter stages of the tournament. Eight of the 16 teams will navigate their way through the various qualifying stages, with the other eight solidifying their places via an invite process.
Thunderpick's head of strategy, Kelly Sanders expressed the company's excitement to "bring the Thunderpick World Championship 2023 to the professional CS:GO scene," all while hyping the upcoming tournament's "record-setting prize pool" in a statement.
While CS2 is mere months away from release, CS:GO seems to be the go-to title for the tournament's run-time, according to reports by Luis Mira at Dexerto. If CS2 drops mid-way through the event, however, the tournament will also make the switch.
The only team currently attending is Evil Geniuses. This invite likely comes from Thunderpick's sponsorship announcement for all three versions of the NA roster in late May this year. The floundering CS:GO lineup has only won three best-of-three series throughout the entirety of 2023.
Now with invites in hand, they'll be skipping both North American Qualifiers set to start in July and August.
A total of 20 North American rosters and 40 teams from the EU region will battle it out in their respective qualifying stages. 12 of these teams will progress to the qualifying playoffs later in the year.
Whether this will be the last tournament of CS:GO is yet to be determined. Hopefully, it provides a fair and entertaining send-off for Global Offensive.