IEM Katowice Major New Challengers Stage Opening Matches Announced

The IEM Katowice Major New Challengers Stage opening matches were announced Wednesday. IEM also detailed the ranking system for the first round of the CS:GO Major.

The New Challengers Stage is comprised of 10 teams from the Americas, Europe, CIS and Asia Minors plus six teams from the FACEIT London Major New Legends Stage that failed to advance.

The First Round matches for the #IEM Katowice Major Challengers Stage are set! We asked the teams to rank each other for seeding and found some interesting insights.
Highest and lowest ranked? Find out here! ? https://t.co/Oo3yguIZcj pic.twitter.com/t6mLPDAyxH

— Intel®ExtremeMasters (@IEM) February 6, 2019

The first CS:GO Major of the year features a new seeding system, outlined by IEM in the match announcement. "...this year’s IEM Katowice Major will introduce a crowdsourced initial seeding system with each participating team ranking their 15 rivals. We then tallied the results, discarded votes that fell too far outside the expected range of the spread, and assigned each team an average ranking. The no. 1 seed got paired with no. 16, no. 2 with no. 15 and so on…," IEM said in the announcement.

The IEM Katowice Major New Challengers Stage runs Feb. 13-17.

For more information on how the teams were seeding, head to IEM's announcement for details.