With the third-ever Rainbow Six: Siege Major to be held next month, the Qualifiers for the event have been coming to a close. North America, Europe, and Latin America have concluded their qualifiers online, however Asia-Pacific (APAC) will be, as usual, holding an offline event due to the size of the region.
Similar to the 2018 Six Invitational Qualifiers LAN, the Paris Major Qualifiers LAN will a four-team event. Teams will play Best-of-Three (Bo3) matches in a double-elimination bracket, ensuring that the truly best team at the event will be booking a berth at the Paris Major.
This time, though, it will be held over the course of just one day, meaning that some games will be running simultaneously but off-stream. Furthermore, the Grand Final will be a Best-of-Five, with the team having won the Upper Final having a 1 - 0 map advantage in the Grand Final.
The four teams at the event qualified through the Stage 2 Closed Qualifiers from each sub-region which concluded on the 1st of July. From Southeast Asia (SEA) is Team Envy, from Korea (KR) is Element Mystic, from Japan (JP) is Sengoku Gaming Extasy, with Australia-New Zealand (ANZ) Athletico Esports rounding things out.
The schedule of games will be as such (times in AEST, estimated):
- 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM -- Semi Final 1, and Semi Final 2 (off-stream)
- 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM -- Upper Final, and Lower Bracket Round 1 (off-stream)
- 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM -- Lower Final
- 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM -- Grand Final
Ysaera from Team Envy at the 2017 Invitational
Team Envy is the most experienced side out of the four, and will be seen as firm favourites to finally make it to another global event after the 2017 Six Invitational, with two of their previous three attempts coming from an arguably unfortunate placement in the bracket.
Somewhat less experienced but still potent will be Element Mystic and Sengoku Gaming. The former qualified to the Season 6 Global LAN Finals in the first season APAC was inducted into the Pro League, and three-fifths of Sengoku featured at the 2018 Six Invitational under eiNs.
Finally, Athletico Esports will be going to their first ever intra-APAC LAN event, but will have a modicum of LAN experience with two of their players having played and won the ANZ Six Invitational held in the August of 2017.
Casting this event will be James “Devmarta” Stewart, Sam “Monkeyfist” Royals, Simon “amFlea” Davis, and Shikhar “InfianEwok” Gupta -- with the presence of InfianEwok, the SEA Pro League caster, marking the first time someone outside of the Australia-New Zealand (ANZ) sub-region will be casting at an APAC event. Helping observe the action will be Alex “Skye” McCallum and Michael “MC” Campagna.
Catch the event broadcast from 10AM AEST (GMT+10) on Sunday the 15th of July on the Rainbow6 Twitch and YouTube channels to find out which team will be joining Fnatic (ANZ) and NORA-Rengo (JP) at the Paris Major in August.