The world's largest computer festival DreamHack Winter 2014 returns with another major competition in the discipline of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. In cooperation with Valve Corporation, DreamHack Winter 2014 is set to be the fourth community funded major tournament featuring whopping prize pool of total $250,000.

DreamHack Winter 2013, the previous year's edition was the first ever tournament to be funded by the Arms Deal update provided by the Washington-based Valve Corporation. It was won by the Swedish forces of Fnatic defeating the heavily favorited Ninjas in Pyjamas 2-0 in the grand final in Jönköping, Sweden.




Preparation:

Interesting and brand new feature particularly for this tournament was that Valve Corporation with their own resources allowed all teams to prepare five days before the tournament in Stockholm at the famous computer club Inferno Online to ensure that all contenders will perform at their maximum level and will be entirely ready for this competition.

Although that unfortunately not all participants were able to travel to Sweden for this training opportunity, the majority of it did and the results according to the players themselves were quite a pleasant surprise.

This important step makes DreamHack Winter 2014 definitely a better prepared and structured tournament than the previous three community funded major tournaments. A simple, but greatly efficient feature needed for all top level competitions to guarantee the best of all contenders.

Furthermore there were no rash decisions taken by the developers such as major updates affecting the game basics and tournament rules changes as we have experienced before. Thus this leaves the teams without excuses for their potential weak performance during the tournament.

Tournament:

DreamHack Winter 2014 will feature total of sixteen teams divined to four groups each consisting of four teams. Same as before the top eight finishers from the previous community funded major tournament were directly invited, while the other eight from different variety qualifiers.

The tournament structure is set to best-of-one double elimination format for the group stage and best-of-three single elimination for the playoffs, as expected.

DreamHack Winter 2014 will of course use the default competitive map pool designed by Valve Corporation featuring the following seven maps:



This tournament consists of three participants from Denmark and Sweden, two from Germany, Ukraine, Poland and North America and one from France and South Africa.

Originally the two French teams Titan eSports and Epsilon e-Sports were supposed to attempt this tournament, but due to the recent massive VAC ban waves, the French teams shockingly left with one for each player being banned for cheating. In this case Hovik 'KQLY' Tovmassian from Titan eSports and Gordon 'Sf' Giry from Epsilon e-Sports. The DreamHack team decided to disqualify them and host a LAN qualifier at Inferno Online with four teams, two of which to replace the mentioned above banned teams. Copenhagen Wolves and Flipside Tactics won the LAN qualifier that took place four days ago and secured the spots of the disqualified French teams.

More information about this situation can be found here.

All teams participating in DreamHack Winter 2014 along with their group set is the following:



Viewing experience:

As always official English stream will be available featuring well known commentators, experts and analysts from organizations such as RoomOnFire and even former SK Gaming and Ninjas in Pyjamas players. Furthermore to ensure you are not going to miss any action at all, most likely community streams in various other languages such as German and Russian will be online too.

The official broadcast team for DreamHack Winter 2014 is the following:



Also for the hardcore fans a pleasant news will be that GOTV services will be open for public and can be found inside CS:GO at the "Watch" tab. You will be able to hear the commentators still even within CS:GO.

Along with the blasting professionalism, the most awaited souvenir packages will also be supplied to the viewers. As long as you are watching the matches via CS:GO or twitch.tv with your accounts being connected, you will be eligible for such drops. Furthermore you can play and win prizes with the Pick'Em Challenge, which is also accessible inside CS:GO.

Weapon stickers with all the teams participating in this competition are also already on the market. They are mandatory if you want to play the Pick'Em Challenge and are useful for enhancing your weapons' design. The stickers are also directly financially supporting the teams in this event.

More information about all available ways of viewing can be found at www.dreamhack.se.

The schedule for the CS:GO discipline of DreamHack Winter 2014 is the following:



SK Gaming will be providing match statistics, news, reviews and more from the $250,000 DreamHack Winter 2014 major tournament. Stay tuned.

Source: HLTV.org