Bye, Bye, Bo5

Is it Christmas already? Senior Product Manager at ESL “Cynil” has confirmed ESL are scaling back the amount of Bo5s in their circuit. The first event this applied to was the just-finished IEM Rio, where the change was met with a generally positive response.

This doesn’t mean we’ll never see Bo5s again; they’re still around for the non-major S-tier events like Katowice and Cologne. Weirdly, Pro League was mentioned in this list as well. Stop trying to make Pro League a thing ESL. This is probably the best compromise because no matter how hard it is to watch for the average viewer, Bo5 is still the ultimate test of CS endurance.

But as with anything ESL does, the opinions are divided. Some wholeheartedly welcome the change. Whilst primarily fans seem to really like their Bo5s. Probably because they’re the 1% that have 7 hours to watch a single series of CS without any problems.

This is what it really boils down to: If everyone had the time to watch a whole Bo5 series and they were all as competitive and fun as Iem Katowice 2022’s final between FaZe and G2 there’d be no discussion about this. But, unfortunately, that isn’t reality.

Most Bo5s are mostly boring and have interludes of interest, and they take bloody forever; HLTV’s brcho took a sample of Bo5 finals, and other than one exception, all of them took 5 hours minimum. Most people simply don’t have time for that.

So, we welcome the Bo3s back from their LAN final break. We’ve missed you, buddy.