Party hard in 2009! We are proud to present you the first EPS finals in the new year. The best teams and players from Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland will meet from 9th to 10th January in Vienna. The alps celebrate the 7th ESL Pro Series finals! 18.000 @ € prizemoney awaits those, who can stand the pressure playing infront of a full house of esport-fans.

Since 1st of January in 2009 the fourth PGL edition is held in Chengdu, China. The best Warcraft 3 and Starcraft compete for 40,000€. 16 players started in each discipline. Three tournament phases are over and eight players were eliminated in both WC3 and SC:BW. The fourth phase called Individual Knock-Out is about to start. Get the latest information here!

This cup did run fast, well and was a lot of fun. 50 teams signed up for it after the community asked so urgently for BBall here in ESL. Thanks for that and now we are giving the top 3 teams their well deserved attention! But that is not the end of BBall, we just started the 2on2 Ladder.

The Most Matches Competition (MMC) continues into the new year! See inside to find out which ladders can get you free premium for just playing and who won last month.

We want to announce our first presents even if it is not Christmas Eve yet. The next TF2 game mode within the ESL will be 2on2 BBall! The 2on2 BBall New Year Cup will give you a fresh and funny start into 2009. The appertaining Ladder will be opened afterwards. All information about the new competitions can be found within this news!

The TF2 6on6 League Season II is coming closer to its end and we want to take this chance to summarize some things up to now. Normally we wanted to finish the league until Christmas, but as there are still 9 open matches, we will expend the deadline until Sunday 11th January. We wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

More than one year ago we've launched the completely revised ESL 4.0 - Redesign v2007. Since then we were by no means idly and made a lot of improvements during the past year. Your feedback from the forums and comments was and is very important to us. Now we want to invite you to the open beta of the redesign v2008.

The ESL will be starting the New Year off with a bang as we go straight into our Winter Leagues. Many top games are participating in this season's leagues and sign ups are open now, find out more inside!

A whole day the ESL was offline due our moving from NGZ in Coburg to fast IT in Düsseldorf, but now we are back! Our IT department worked endlessly to bring you the ESL back as soon as possible and a few minutes ago they finished the job and our Webdevelopers put the ESL on again. Everything should work again and we can all start playing again.

As earlier announced, the ESL Server move is taking place tomorrow, so please take notice that all matches for tomorrow will have to be rescheduled! You will not be able to reach the page during the day, however, we will have a blog open to keep you updated on what's going on.

Some of you might have stumbled upon someone that for some reason "need" your password and/or account name. This is however obviously a trick that dishonest phishers use in attempts to get your account data for even more dishonest reasons. Therefor we would like to clarified the usual methods to protect yourself and what you have to do when it's too late.

Today we can announce where and when the first UK Pro Series finals will take place. This is a very exciting time for everyone involved as we are in season one of the ESL Pro Series for the United Kingdom and we are sure to see some great eSports competitive play at our first finals.