At IEM’s second PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds tournament it’s all about the squads
The second Intel Extreme Masters Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds offline invitational tournament is set to kick off this weekend in Oakland, California.
The tournament will feature a combination of 20 professional and amateur teams each competing for their slice of the $200,000 prize pool. Their placement will be decided by eight matches played across the tournament’s two days.
Today’s tournament kicks off at 1 p.m. PT/4 p.m. ET. You can watch it here, via Twitch.
As an esport, PUBG is just starting to find its footing. During the game’s first appearance at IEM, back in August during Gamescom in Cologne, the organizers didn’t yet know what the defining competitive mode would be. The tournament attempted to cater to all corners of the PUBG community, including both first- and third-person games spanning solos, duos and squads.
Thankfully, in the intervening months, the community reached a consensus and first-person squads has become the dominant PUBG competitive mode and that’s exactly what IEM Oakland is built around. For the first time, professional teams like Method, TSM and Cloud9 will be able to face off against one another live and in-person on the mode their most experienced in.
Alongside these 12 pro teams, who are joining the tournament through invitation, the tournament will also feature eight teams, four from Europe and four from North America, who qualified through an open tournament. Thanks to the unpredictability of Battlegrounds ’ matches, this is a prime chance for amateur players to vie for an upset against some of the best in the world, something that happened back in Gamescom when THZ and Yukie went from the open qualifiers to winning the third-person duos segment of the tournament.
This schedule will be updated with the results from each match
Match 1 – 4:00 p.m. ET
Match 2 – 5:00 p.m. ET
Match 3 – 6:20 p.m. ET
Match 4 – 7:20 p.m. ET
