ESL is spoiling its North American Dota 2 fans with the return of ESL One Raleigh 2025. It has been a decade since the region had an ESL LAN tournament, so this is exciting for US fans.
Commencing from April 7-13, the ESL One Raleigh 2025 features a million-dollar prize pool between 12 Dota 2 teams.
ESL One Raleigh 2025 (Image credit: ESL)
As usual, tune into ESL’s official Twitch channel, where the live broadcasts will be available.
ESL One Raleigh 2025 features two single round-robin groups of six teams for its Group Stage, where matches are best-of-two, which is a classic ESL tournament format that offers great match-up odds for Dota 2 Betting.
Top-two seeds from each group advances into Upper Bracket of Playoffs, while the third and fourth-place seeds stand a chance in Lower Bracket. Whereas the bottom two seeds are eliminated prematurely. In the Playoffs, it’s a double-elimination bracket, where matches are best-of-three, except the best-of-five grand finals.
Twelve best-in-class Dota 2 teams are participating in ESL One Raleigh 2025. Four of which, are the strongest on the EPT Leaderboard, featuring PARIVISION, BetBoom Team, Team Falcons and Team Liquid.
Additionally, even the regional qualifier teams are quite amazing, such as Tundra Esports and Team Spirit. But not to exclude AVULUS, Nigma Galaxy, Team Tidebound, Talon Esports, Shopify Rebellion and HEROIC.
The tables have turned in the favorites list among the participating teams at ESL One Raleigh 2025. Typically, it’s the EPT Leaderboard top dogs that are in the spotlight for favorites, yet this time around, the candidates were from regional qualifiers. Tundra Esports and Team Spirit from the Western and Eastern Europe regional qualifiers respectively are the favorites going into ESL One Raleigh 2025, especially after their incredible grand finals at DreamLeague S25.
That aside, fans are still displeased with ESL’s lack of adherence over unexpected circumstances that happen during their tournaments. Notably, when they remained silent regarding disqualifying both Tundra Esports and Team Spirit over the abuse of Dota 2 Smoke Bug.
Nevertheless, ESL does still take action on clear-cut cases, where the abuser is clearly in the wrong, such as when they disqualified a team for using a ringer in closed qualifiers of ESL One Raleigh 2025.
It’s a concerning time to be a fan of Team Falcons, especially since their underwhelming performance in recent tournaments. Once a noteworthy powerhouse that won two major Dota 2 tournaments in 2025, Falcons is seemingly struggling to beat its new rivals. And they even lost to an underdog team, called Team Tidebound at the PGL Wallachia S3.
With its downhill performance, fans are struggling to support this once phenomenal team and question whether Falcons’ decision to not have a roster change was the right call this season. Additionally, even PARIVISION, BetBoom Team and the International 2024 Champions, Team Liquid, are not putting up much of a battle to consider themselves a challenge.
Lastly, if you are into overwhelming odds, keep an eye out for the underdogs, such as Nigma Galaxy, Talon Esports, and Team Tidebound. These newly-debut teams will have very low chance of winning, but if you fancy the risk of betting on underdogs, these are your picks.
Catch ESL One Raleigh 2025 in action as these teams brawl it out in the heart of North America.
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