Liquid fail to claim their reward for stopping the Pro League Season 8 winners in their tracks.
Astralis has bagged a whopping $1million bonus as a result of their 3-1 win against Liquid in the grand finals of Season 8 of the ESL Pro League. The prize money comes via the Intel Grand Slam (IGS) award.
In a rather stylish move, each player on Astralis will also receive a gold bar with their name and event wins engraved upon it.
The IGS was created back in June 2017 to provide an extra incentive for teams to win four out of ten $200,000-or-higher ESL tournaments. To win, a team must win three more of their next nine qualifying events after claiming their first victory in a series.
To spice things up even further, any teams preventing an IGS-contender from completing their grand slam receive $100,000 in “bounty” prizes. That bounty was, however, denied to Pro League co-finalists Liquid on this occasion.
As for the IGS award’s history, other teams have come painfully close to the money in the past, with FaZe winning ESL One New York 2017 and IEM Sydney 2018. They couldn’t, however, go on to win two follow-up tournaments to secure the prize.
There’ll be another chance for CS:GO’s top teams to have a crack at this monster prize in the future, when season two of the IGS kicks off. Qualifying dates and tournaments have not yet been confirmed at the time of publishing this article, however.
