With RGL Season 15 beginning next week, The Fireside Cup offers a preview of the season to come, with six of the ten potential Invite teams competing in its playoffs beginning with the quarterfinals on Monday, 20 May, and culminating in the grand final on Thursday, 23 May. Gather around as we preview what’s to resolve for this two week cup.

Format

Using a modified version of the “Unity” ruleset this cup adds a limit of one active offclass per team, meaning no more than one Pyro, Engineer, Heavy, Sniper, or Spy per team. With this rule to remember the playoffs are single-elimination, making every match high stakes as teams vie to cash in on the updated prize pool of $750 sponsored by Mannco.store.

Four teams received direct invites to the playoffs due to their performance in past RGL seasons who competed against each other in 2-map series to determine the top four seeds for the bracket stage. The quarterfinals will see each invited team compete in a best-of-three against one of the top two teams from each of the two open groups which fought for qualification earlier this week.

Group Stage

With a round-robin structure for all three groups, head-to-head was the first tiebreaker but never came into play, with both open groups needing no tiebreakers and both ties in the Invite Group belonging to teams with 1:1 head-to-heads. Following head-to-head, round score difference broke the both ties, making the Bagel match between froyotech and Global Clan the game that decided seeding, with the top two taking 5-0 shutouts in all other matches against the lower two invited teams.

Invite Group

• Like A G6 (5-1, 24-4)
• froyotech (5-1, 24-5)
• Global Clan (1-5, 6-25)
• GlobalClan Ice (1-5, 5-25)

Group A

• G-FORCE HAMSTERDAM (5-1, 26-9)
• The Mafia (4-2, 20-8)
• Fjord Gaming (3-3, 13-12) Eliminated
• aluminimum wage (0-6, DNF) Eliminated

Group B

• Anglerfish (4-0, 20-1)
• ctap2work (2-2, 11-10)
• Estrogen took my homie (0-4, DNF) Eliminated

Schedule

Monday, 20 May - Quarterfinals - 22 EDT | 19 PDT

• Like A G6 vs. ctap2work
• GlobalClan Ice vs. G-FORCE HAMSTERDAM
• froyotech vs. The Mafia
• Global Clan vs. Anglerfish

Wednesday, 22 May - Semifinals - 22 EDT | 19 PDT

• Winner of Like A G6 vs. ctap2work vs. Winner of GlobalClan Ice vs. G-FORCE HAMSTERDAM
• Winner of froyotech vs. The Mafia vs. Winner Global Clan vs. Anglerfish

Thursday, 23 May - Grand Final - 22 EDT | 19 PDT

• Winner of TBD vs. TBD vs. Winner of TBD vs. TBD

Coverage

The playoffs will be streamed throughout, with Fireside Casts' main Twitch and YouTube channels as the A stream and EssentialsTF's Twitch as the B stream. Your talent for playoffs will be:

Casters:

• jemond
• Tcmano
• row
• DeltaMarket
• Nbr1Rckr
• throne
• zak
• siyo

Production:

• antlers
• Dr. Underscore
• Pika
• foodeater

For more information about the event check out the Toornament or Liquipedia pages. And of course I hope to see you there o7