The first Ukrainian esports cup kicks off next week

It wasn’t very long ago – only three months in fact – that Ukraine acknowledged cybersports (their official word for esports) as an official sport. While this has already happened in many countries around the world, the Ukrainian esports scene is still stuck in its infancy – but it’s evolving quickly.

The Ukrainian esports Federation or UESF partnered with prominent Ukrainian tech and electronics brand, Eldorado, in order to launch the very first national Ukrainian esports cup. The cup will be a CS:GO event featuring a few other prominent sponsors, including Parimatch, Visa and LG. Held during the official CS:GO season, the cup will launch on January 18^th and last until March 28^th.

© UESF

The details of the Cup

Ukraine, being quite a big country, will be split into five regional conferences – West, North, Centre, East, and South. Each of these conferences has several regions within it. West contains the Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil regions; North the Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv regions; Centre the Chernivtsi, Khmelnytskyi, Vinnytsia, Cherkasy, and Kirovohrad regions, East the Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Poltava regions; and South the Odessa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya regions, as well as the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

Signups are open to anyone – both full teams and individual players or small groups can sign up in their relevant local conference. These conferences will each be split into two divisions – A and  B. The stronger teams according to ELO points will go into Division A, while the weaker ones will go into B, in order to keep things fair.

Both divisions will compete in a round-robin best of 1 format, as will the playoffs. The later parts of the League, called Super League will also have a round-robin format, however with a best of 2 instead. The Super League playoffs will use a simple single-elimination system with a best of 3 format.

Division A will play 66 matches across the entire season – Division B’s matches will depend on how many teams register; however everyone will get a chance to compete if they want to sign up and can either form a team or be placed with other players to fill one.

© UESF

Prize Pool and Rewards

The 12 best teams across the whole Ukraine will be participating in the Super League, where they’ll get all sorts of bonuses and goodies – including a special logo developed for them, a uniform, and even a social media platform and photoshoot, if possible. That’s for making it that far – the winners of the Super League will also get to walk away with 100.000 UAH – that’s roughly 3000 Euros. The top 6 teams will all receive a small monetary reward as well, on top of the bragging rights for being one of the best teams in the Ukraine’s inaugural esports cup.

We expect esports betting to be available for the Super League stage of the event, as there will be enough match history to create betting markets.

Finally, there are also some incentives for fans and those wanting to watch the new competition – the UESF will be hosting a number of giveaways with its partners. These include Parimatch, a betting operator, and a well-known Ukrainian gaming PC brand ExpertPC. Two people will get the chance to win a powerful custom built gaming PC.

Follow the most recent updates on the official UESF Youtube page.

Read next: FURIA adds Junior and honda to replace HEN1