Buchholz system will be used at PGL Major Stockholm 2021

To remove the impact of randomness on seeding, PGL has partnered with Valve to use the Buchholz system for the upcoming PGL Major Stockholm 2021. The changes will not affect the two starting rounds of the Challengers stage, which will continue to be seeding based on regional rankings.

It is expected that the Buchholz system, which uses tournament results to rank teams according to the difficulty of their opponents in previous rounds (the total score of opponents), will help match teams with the same score, eliminating the random factor in the strength of the teams.

This means that in the Challengers stage, the first and second rounds will be entirely based on a predetermined seeding before Buchholz takes over as the main seeding system in the third, fourth and fifth rounds to separate teams with the same result.

The first round of the Legend Stage will use a combination of a predetermined seeding for the eight teams directly eligible for that stage and the results for the remaining eight teams that qualified from the Challengers Stage. The second round will again use the predetermined seeding based on the ranking tables, before the third round uses the Buchholz system.

In the playoffs, the Buchholz system will be used to separate teams with the same score in the Legend stage (two 3-0, three 3-1 and three 3-2) to determine the matches in the grid.

The PGL rulebook provides the following example to explain how the Buchholz system works:

• The first team goes with two defeats, and your previous opponents with the results 2-0 and 1-1. Your tie-break score is 2 (your previous opponents have only 3 wins and 1 loss), so 3-1 = 2.
• The second team also has two defeats, while their previous opponents go 1-1. Their tie-break score is 0 (previous opponents have a total of 2 wins and 2 losses), so 2-2 = 0.
• This means that the first team will receive a higher seeding, since its opponents were stronger than those of the second team.

As a reminder, the predetermined seeding used in the early rounds in the two Swiss rounds is as follows:

Challengers stage: Spirit, Astralis, paiN, ENCE, BIG, Movistar Riders, Heroic, MOUZ, Sharks, TYLOO, Renegades, Entropiq, GODSENT, Virtus.pro, Copenhagen Flames and FaZe.

Legend stage: NIP, FURIA, Natus Vincere, Vitality, Liquid, Gambit, G2 and Evil Geniuses + 8 Challengers teams.

As a reminder, PGL Major Stockholm 2021 will take place from October 26 to November 7 in Sweden. 24 teams will compete for a prize pool of $ 2,000,000, as well as BLAST Premier and ESL Pro Tour points. Note that the playoffs of the championship will be held at the Avicii Arena with spectators, while the early stages of the championship will be held in a studio format.