The Overwatch Winter Premiere presented by NGE is set to get underway in the next few minutes with the first of four Open Play days. There are no invites and no free passes for a shot at the $100,000 prize pool; everyone must qualify online, so expect to see the stars of North American Ovewatch out in force tonight.

The action will be streamed live from the NGE Studio in Burbank, California on twitch.tv/overwatch_nge with Caleb "WavePunk" Simmons, David "Nagatron" Williams and Team Fortress 2 favourite Anthony "gecks" Miserendino on the mics from the semifinals onward around 5:30PM PT / 2:30 CET. You can dig deeper in to the brackets over on the tournament hub on smash.gg and we cover the latter stages of each day our match ticker.

Teams

Ten teams have been given preferential seeding due to past tournament results:

  • Cloud9
  • compLexity
  • EnVyUs
  • FaZe Clan
  • Fnatic
  • Immortals
  • Method
  • NRG
  • Splyce
  • Team Liquid

Other names signed up for Day 1 include Rise Nation, Luminosity, Selfless and Really Cool Guys, with a host of 80 teams in total set to contest for a spot in the groups.

Overwatch Winter Premiere presented by NGE

Format

Open Play will see four separate single elimination brackets played out over four consecutive days with all fixtures will be best-of-three up until the best-of-five finals.

Points distributed to top eight on each play day:

  • 1st: Direct qualification to group stage
  • 2nd: 100 points
  • 3rd: 50 points
  • 4th: 40 points
  • 5th-8th: 20 points

After Open Play is completed the top four teams by points will join the four winners in the group stage

Maps

Each day of Open Play sees a restricted pool of six maps from a total of eight maps. The five maps that won't feature in Open Play are Hanamura, Lijiang Tower, Numbani, Eichenwalde and Dorado.

Day 1:

  • Hollywood
  • King’s Row
  • Watchpoint: Gibraltar
  • Nepal
  • Ilios
  • Volskaya Industries

Day 2:

  • Hollywood
  • King’s Row
  • Route 66
  • Watchpoint: Gibraltar
  • Ilios
  • Temple of Anubis

Day 3:

  • Hollywood
  • Route 66
  • Watchpoint: Gibraltar
  • Nepal
  • Temple of Anubis
  • Volskaya Industries

Day 4:

  • King’s Row
  • Route 66
  • Nepal
  • Ilios
  • Temple of Anubis
  • Volskaya Industries

The higher seeding team picks the first map with the other team picking side, whilst for each subsequent map, loser picks map and winner picks side.